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.