Topics in 18th-Century Literature: Love Gone Wrong

Shakespeare wrote, "the course of true love never did run smooth" and Freud wrote of the "vicissitudes" of the passions, yet most readers regard heterosexual love stories as transparent, intelligible, and above all inevitable. We will read classic 18th-century novels from England, France, and Germany that show roads to and through the love plot to be rocky and full of impasses and swerves, with no certain endpoint. Such "vicissitudes" mark the very form of the narratives we will encounter. Class will examine issues such as gender fluidity, cross-dressing, queerness, love-madness, violence, repression, and panic.