English Civil War
war of styles/ culture wars
Royalist
Puritan

Tories and Whigs

Classical, Neoclassical
Augustan
Modern/early modern

Classical versus Romantic

Restoration Drama and "worldliness"

humanism
empiricism - Locke and Hobbes
enlightenment
"literary history" and the canon
colonization/imperialism
early feminist principles
"print culture" and the Age of Paper

the Age of Experience

(outdated: "Age of Reason")

birth of consumer society - and its literature

dialectic, contraries held in tension
common sense

the gentleman, man of conversation
checks and balances

pride and prejudice - correcting bias in the limited perspectives of individuals

genre as argument, conventions, decorum, levels of diction

The hierarchy of genres (high to low): epic, tragedy, romance, comedy, satire
heroic couplet
proverb
essay as modern form
epistle - letter form

mock-epic/heroi-comical form
"novelty"
tragedy, romance, comedy, irony - the modes
the sublime
Rabelaisian humor

masks and masquerade -

theatricality, spectacle

Swift's persona/personae
poetics
prosody/scansion/metrics
self-critique

Battle of the Books: Ancients/Moderns
Grub Street

Stuart (Jameses and Charleses, William and Mary and Anne, up to 1715) and Hanover (1715 to present) dynasties

"oriental fable", existentialism, telos/goal (with study of Samuel Johnson's Rasselas only)

father of the novel--mother of the novel

heteroglossia