Affiliated Departments & Programs

After holding a position at the University of Iowa, Deborah Laycock, a specialist in Restoration and eighteenth-century literature, came to Kenyon College in 1991. She has since developed Canadian literature as a field for research and teaching.

Laycock is currently completing a book manuscript entitled An Eighteenth-Century Sense of Place: The Urban Pastoral and has begun work on a project examining gender and metamorphosis in early modern culture, an early version of which has appeared in an essay in Textual Bodies: Changing Boundaries of Literary Representation (SUNY Press, 1997). She has served as the Chair of the Committee on Academic Standards and has twice served as resident director of the Kenyon-Exeter Program at the University of Exeter.

Education

1987 — Doctor of Philosophy from Stanford University

1979 — Master of Arts from Univ British Columbia

1977 — Bachelor of Arts from University of Alberta

Courses Recently Taught

This course serves as an introduction to British literature and culture of the Restoration and early 18th century (c. 1660-1745). This period witnessed profound national transformations: the restoration of the British monarchy in 1660 with Charles II’s return from exile and the 1707 Act of Union, which joined Scotland to England and Wales. A burgeoning literary marketplace and leisure class facilitated the development of literary forms like the novel and a return to the theaters. The rise of Enlightenment thinking, which privileged reason and sensory experience, began to shape larger cultural discourses about the future of the British nation and the nature of man that would culminate in a series of revolutions by the end of the century. Focusing on the theme of embodiment, we consider how writers in this period imagined bodies both within and without the British Isles. How did 18th-century literature attempt to represent bodies and the relationship between bodies in the face of ongoing debates about what constituted humanness? How did these writers conceive of racial, gender or sexual difference, and to what ends? Which bodies mattered, and which were only fictions or even unworthy of representation at all?\nThis course prepares students to read and analyze both primary sources from the period and secondary sources that model different critical approaches. The course assignments also prepare students to think across multiple texts and draw them together in clear, nuanced arguments that link form and content. The course also trains students to think about literary texts within their historical contexts and trace continuities from the 18th century to the present. \nThis counts toward the 1700-1900 requirement for the major. Open only to first-years and sophomores. Prerequisite: ENGL 103 or 104.