ENGL425 - Modern British Literature

Close study of selected works from the first half of Shakespeare's career. Generic issues of early histories, comedies, tragedies. Language, theme, dramatic technique, sources, and early modern English social-historical context.

This course will explore literature written about and from within the various artistic, political, and sexual revolutions of the twentieth century. The authors we study will include most of the following: W. B. Yeats, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, Katherine Mansfield, D. H. Lawrence, T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett, Chinua Achebe, Angela Carter, Nadine Gordimer, Tom Stoppard, Salman Rushdie, and Jeanette Winterson. Themes that we will pursue over the semester include the changing forms of experimental writing, resistance to British imperialism, relations between women and men, the nature of the self, the figure of the artist, and writing about the body and sexuality. Most of the semester will be devoted to major achievements and innovations in fiction; poetry and drama will also be discussed. A representative selection of the most compelling British, Irish, Commonwealth, and Postcolonial writers will be presented. Two seven page papers required.

Section(s):
0101 -  Brian Richardson