Introduction
The lecture course examines 19th and 20th-century British literature as much through artistic movements (linking Romanticism, Realism, Naturalism, Modernism, and its successors) as through the period’s socio-cultural contexts. Moving across the genres, we explore the, oft-
recurring, themes of: industrialisation, urbanisation, the state of civil society, the colonial project, anarchism, the class system, the impact of war, stream of consciousness, allegory, dystopia, theatre as confrontation, conformism, regionalism, vernacular speech, and politics. We will look at the work of authors such as Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, Wells, Wilde, Conrad, A. Bennett, Shaw, the First-World-War poets, West, Eliot, Woolf, Orwell, Golding, Sillitoe, K. Amis, Beckett, Pinter, Orton, Welsh, and McEwan.
Objectives
This survey course seeks to plot historical development against the developing literatures of its periods to enable students to understand the literary innovations of writers, who are often keenly aware of one another. Students will be introduced to the methodology of textual commentary and hone their skills in reading, textual analysis, note-taking and essay writing.
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Practical information
