The History of British Literature Course 4101-4ZHLBO
The course in the history of English literature is a historically structured survey of major literary texts written from Old English period to Modern times. Chronologically arranged texts provide the student with a map of literary, social, historical and cultural changes over the centuries. The main areas of investigation cover the following problems and authors:
Semester 2 - From Romanticism to Modern Times
1.Romantic poetry: The mystical and social poetry of William Blake' Songs of Innocence and Experience; The Preface to Lyrical Ballads as a manifesto of English Romanticism; The Lake Poets: William Wordsworth and S.T.Coleridge and their views on nature, imagination, poetry; the second generation of English Romantics: Percy Bysshe Shelley - revolutionary idealism of his poetry; George Gordon Byron orientalism and satire of his poems; Hellenism, medievalism and art in the poetry of John Keats; Romantic novel: Mary Shelley (terror tale and myth) and Jane Austen (satire and feminism).
2.Victorian novel: Emily Bronte's multi-genre narration and symbolic/realistic composition in Wuthering Heights; Bildungsroman, social and moral criticism in Dickens' Great Expectations; Society vs the individual, utilitarian ethics in George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss; Social criticism and departures from Victoria conventions in Thackeray's Vanity Fair; Morality, determinism and symbolism in Hardy's Tess
3.Victorian Poetry: A.Tennyson as a mouthpiece of Victorian controversies; Dramatic monologue convention in R.Browning's poems; the poetics of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in Rossetti's poems; Nature, religion and technical acomplishment of G.M.Hopkins's poetry.
4.Twentieth century literature: The "Gay Nineties" and Aestheticism in O.Wilde's novels; Poetry of World War I (Rosenberg, Owen, Sassoon); Yeats and the Irish Revival: Irish myths, the Cabala, alchemy; Modernism in poetry: T.S.Eliot (tradition, objective correlative, irony, topicality); Imagism; Literature of ideas: G.B.Shaw, H.G.Wells, G.K.Chesterton; Modernism in the novel: narrative techniques and moral problems in Joseph Conrad's novels; Stream of consciousness and internal monologue in James Joyce and Virginia Woolf; Morality vs instincts, body vs spirit in D.H.Lawrence's expressionist novels; Utopian and dystopian vision of modern civilization in Aldous Huxley and George Orwell; Poetry of the 1930's: "Macspaunday" group, W.H.Auden, Dylan Thomas' "New Romanticism"; Developments in drama: Theatre of the Absurd and the comedy of menace: Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter; The Angry Young Men movement: John Osborn; Post-war and postmodern poetry: The Movement, The Group (Larkin, Hughes, Heaney, Harrison, Raine, Morgan); Modern and Postmodern novel: Allegorical fiction in Iris Murdoch and William Golding; "Academics": M.Bradbury, D.Lodge; Experimental novelisits: A.Carter, I. MacEwan, S.Rushdie, J.Fowles.
Type of course
Bibliography
REFERENCES AND TEXTBOOKS
1.The Norton Anthology of English Literature, New York, vols.1-2
2.The Oxford Anthology of English Literature, New York, vols.1-2
3.M.Drabble, The Oxford Companion to English Literature, Oxford, 1985
4.A.Burgess, English Literature, Longman, 1990
5.B.Ford (ed.),The New Pelican Guide to English Literature, Penguin, vols.1-9
6.M.Alexander, A History of English Literature, Macmillan, 2000
7.Cuddon, J.A., A Dictionary of Literary Terms, London & New York, 1982
8.Zgorzelski, a., Lectures on British Literature, Parts 1-3, Gdansk, 1999
9.Mroczkowski, P., Historia literatury angielskiej, Wroclaw, 1986
10.Zbierski, Henryk: 'Literatura angielska' , w: Dzieje literatur europejskich, Warszawa 1982
11.Stamirowska, Krystyna, (ed.) Współczesna powieść brytyjska, Kraków: Universitas, 1997.
12.Diniejko, A. Introduction to the Study of Literature in English. Kielce, 2005.
13.Bela Teresa, Mazur Zygmunt: A College Anthology of English Literature, Kraków,1997
Additional information
Additional information (registration calendar, class conductors, localization and schedules of classes), might be available in the USOSweb system: