Enlightenment to Modernism: British Literature, 1780-1914
ENGL 208
Spring 2014 not offered
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This course offers an introduction to modern British literature and culture, with an emphasis on the ways in which literary form responds to and shapes the movements of history. We begin with the emergence in the late 18th century of two new literary forms with substantial debts to the Enlightenment--the novel and Romantic poetry--and trace the development of these genres in the hands of later writers, from George Eliot's panoramic depiction of a small city at a moment of profound historical, social, and economic transformation to E. M. Forster's portrait of two sisters who exemplify a country caught between its ideals and the reality it has made for itself; from Robert Browning's repudiation of Romantic confession to Oscar Wilde's definition of art as artifice, or "lying." Central themes include changing concepts of personhood; the relation among science, nature, and faith; the politics of class and gender; the tension between the language of everyday life and the language of literature; and the role of art in a rapidly changing, chaotic, and often exhilarating modern world. |
Credit: 1 |
Gen Ed Area Dept:
HA ENGL |
Course Format: Lecture / Discussion | Grading Mode: Graded |
Level: UGRD |
Prerequisites: None |
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Fulfills a Requirement for: (ENGL)(ENGL-Literature) |
Major Readings:
Jane Austen, EMMA; George Eliot, MIDDLEMARCH; E.M. Forster, HOWARDS END; poems by William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Percy Shelley, Alfred Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, Robert Browning, Christina Rossetti, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Oscar Wilde, and others; works by David Hume, John Locke, Samuel Johnson, Charles Dickens, and Walter Pater.
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Examinations and Assignments: Midterm and final exams; two short (4-5p.) essays. |
Additional Requirements and/or Comments: This course contributes to the British Literature concentration of the English major. |
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