Following loosely in the track of Raymond Williams’s 1973 book of the same title, this course will consider the interplay of urban and rustic life in literary productions of the early British Industrial Revolution. Writers we read will include William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Jane Austen, and possibly Charles Dickens. We will take advantage of the major exhibition of William Blake that will be on offer at London’s spectacular Tate Britain gallery (the first there in two decades), and we will probably make an excursion to Chawton, about 40 miles outside of London, to see Jane Austen’s village, including the 16th-century country house where her brother Edward presided.