This module reads major British fiction and some poetry of the eighteenth century in terms of its relation to the development of society which is recognisably modern. We will examine such writers as Defoe, Swift, Pope, Richardson, Fielding and Sterne, and exploring the `rise of the novel', the coming dominance of prose representation in journalism and fiction, the rise of the middle class, the move to an urban cash-nexus society governed by reason and contractual economic exchange, and the construction of new kinds of subjectivities for men and women according to the needs of middle-class patriarchy. In many ways, this module studies the development of the `modern mind'.