High Life and Low Life: Polite and Popular Forms in 18th-century British Literature

In this course we will examine the complex relationship between elite and 'popular' forms - old forms and new - in the 18th-century English literary imagination. We will consider, for example, the way new so-called popular or 'low' genres¿criminal biography, travel literature, political tracts, newspapers, cartoons, broadsheets, conduct books and the like - typically produced for a newly-literate, largely middle-class audience, eager for 'entertainment'¿began shaping so-called 'mainstream' Augustan literature more and more over the century. At the same time we will track the declining fortunes of the traditional so-called 'neoclassical' literary ideals represented in the works of Milton, Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift and other 'elite' writers of the period, all of whom had absorbed and wished to preserve an active reverence for the works of classical antiquity. But we will also be concerned with the 'real-world' implications of the contemporary imaginative split between "high life" and "low life." By examining literary representations of various subcultures - and exemplary new social types such as the Criminal, the Hack, the Whore and the Madman - we will attempt to describe the historic significance of the high-low dialectic in classic eighteenth-century works, and the underlying and increasingly 'modern' and dynamic system of social, philosophical and ideological relations that gave rise to it.