Syllabus

Short Course Description

This course is a survey of English literature from the beginning of the eighteenth century until early twentieth-century Modernism, along with the required historical and political contexts. Together, we will see how ingenious writers from across three hundred years responded to the major historical and cultural developments of their time. Students will read carefully chosen texts by Swift, Defoe, Pope, Dr. Johnson, Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Austen, the Brownings, Tennyson, Rossetti, Yeats, Conrad, Wilde, T.S. Eliot, Joyce and Woolf. Under my guidance, we will explore the underlying values and literary styles of the main literary periods of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, while referring to the evolution of concepts such as democracy, imperialism, industrialism, religion, nature, class conflict, Otherness, race and gender. By the end of this course, students will gain a better understanding of the literary and cultural production that defined these literary periods, the historical developments that accompanied them, and the fine and often blurred lines that distinguish between them.