AustLit

The topics in this unit vary from time to time. Students should consult with the Department to confirm current offerings, which include:

Reason, Imagination, Revolution: Literature and Culture from Pope to Austen (Dr Payne, Sem 1). This unit introduces students to writings that track the trajectories of formal, philosophical and cultural change in British literary culture between 1710 and 1825. It examines how Reason is idealised and critiqued by writers associated with the Enlightenment, such as Pope, Swift, Haywood and Johnson, and how it is situated in relation to Imagination and developed into the Romanticism of Blake, Wordsworth and Coleridge.

The unit also explores how those conceptual exchanges feed into the revolutionary fervor of the 1790s and provokes the responses of Austen, Shelley, Byron and Keats, who along with their Romantic forebears, set the cultural bases for British literature into the nineteenth century. From Doll to Cyborg (Dr McCallum, Sem 1).

Throughout the history of children's literature—and more recently, children's film—toys have been depicted as taking on a life of their own, a life which sometimes reflects, interrogates, or carnivalises human experience of the world. This unit examines the various uses made in literature and film of manufactured, surrogate human characters, ranging from dolls and stuffed toys to robots and cyborgs.