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Edward Young’s Night Thoughts
Edward Young (1683-1765) was one of the most important writers of his day, and yet is today a figure largely forgotten in the annals of literary history. He is often categorised along with Thomas Grey and others as a ‘graveyard’ poet – poets who liked the dark, macabre and melancholy. He was a poet, a philosopher, a politician, a theologian, and a critic. His works were cited by Goethe and Kierkegaard, and were extremely popular in all European languages. His writing rebelled against the austere style of the Augustan and early Enlightenment age, preferring emotional, dark, spiritual, and religious themes embedded with artistic flair and passion – in stylistic terms he was a precursor of the Romantics and the Gothic writers of the century that followed. In this course, we are going to recover Young from his unearned obscurity by looking at his most important work, Night Thoughts.
Night Thoughts is a series of 9 loosely connected poetic letters, all of which deal with the theme of death. They were published in between 1742 and 1745 and were an immediate success. The poems are addressed to an unbeliever, Lorenzo, urging him to accept the Christian way of life but they are actually much more than this: in essence, they are a reflection on existence, on life, on death, and on the question of fate. In many ways, they are a precursor of existentialist thinking in the 19th and 20th Centuries. They are gloomy, miserable, and very moving.
In this course, we are going to go through the poems one by one and look at the philosophical, theological, and political ideas contained within them. There are 9 letters, one of which is too long to be dealt with in one class, so we will take 10 classes to read the work. Then we will briefly relate Young’s work to those who followed him, and explore why the Victorians sought to damage his reputation (it was George Eliot, as it always is, who is to blame).
You will only need to buy one text: Edward Young, Night Thoughts (Cambridge Edition)
As Young is a philosophical and religious thinker, we will also deal with certain aspects of Christian theology and philosophy. You don’t really need any background knowledge, as I will supply relevant information, but a cursory (ie a certain internet encyclopaedia – I recommend originals, always, but we don't have much time) understanding of the following texts might be helpful:
Plato, The Republic
The Gospel of Matthew
The Nicene Creed
Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy
Milton, Paradise Lost
The exam will take place between 16:15 and 17:45 on Wednesday 14 July 2021. |