Madness and Enlightenment: Literature 1660-1800

The term "enlightenment" has been used to emphasize the power of reason in the development of intellectual freedom, democracy, capitalism, class mobility, and other aspects of 18th-century experience. However, the period's major writers were fascinated by unreason, by aberrant states of mind from love melancholy to outright madness. Readings include Swift's Tale of a Tub , Pope's Dunciad , Johnson's Rasselas , Sterne's Tristram Shandy , Boswell's Hypochondriack , and Godwin's Caleb Williams .