ENGL630 Readings in 20th Century British Literature

In this course we will explore in depth the most significant and influential works of British, Irish, and Postcolonial literature of the twentieth century.

These will include some stories and novellas by James, Conrad, Katherine Mansfield, D. H. Lawrence, Rebecca West, and Jean Rhys, some episodes of Ulysses, Ford’s The Good Soldier, Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, and a cluster of texts by Beckett. We will also spend time on the poetry of Yeats, Eliot, HD, and others and on the plays by some of the following authors: Wilde, Synge, Pinter, Churchill. and Stoppard. The final month or so will be devoted to more recent writers like Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Angela Carter, Ian McEwan, Nadine Gordimer, Derek Walcott, Jeanette Winterson, J. M. Coetzee, Zadie Smith, and Bernadine Evaristo. We will chart the general trajectories and intriguing deviations of literary history, paying particular attention to the origins and development of modernism, postmodernism, and postcolonial literature. Throughout the semester, we will follow the development and transformation of innovative formal techniques, representations of race and ethnicity, constructions of gender, sex, and sexuality, debates over nation and empire, representations of the body, and the elaboration of an insistently intertextual literary history.

Section(s):
0101 -  Brian Richardson