English: British Literature II

Selected texts from the late 18th century to the present. Explores periodization, genre, key terms and concepts through close reading and critical analysis. Fulfills major requirements; open to non-majors.

Open to Degree and PACE students

This course satisfies the AH2 (Literature) component of the Catamount Core Curriculum. In this section we will survey English literature from the late eighteenth century to the mid-twentieth century with attention to the development of important genres; to the engagement of writers with the great historical events and salient intellectual, political, and ethical issues of their time; and to major figures in poetry, fiction, and drama, including William Wordsworth, Jane Austen (Pride and Prejudice), Mary Shelley (Frankenstein), T. S. Eliot, William Butler Yeats, and Virginia Woolf (Mrs. Dalloway). The literature of the British Isles over the course of the last 240 years both reflects and participates in the political, economic, scientific, and intellectual revolutions that have marked the emergence of the modern world. The period saw, among many other striking developments, quantum leaps forward in science and technology; epic global wars, from Great Britain’s protracted struggle with Napoleonic France to the two catastrophic world wars of the last century; the rise and fall of the British Empire, from its apogee in the second decade of the twentieth century (when King George V held sway over a quarter of the world’s population and of its land surface area) to its rapid decline in the aftermath of World War II; the abolition of slavery in the Empire; the crisis of religious faith that consumed the Victorians and many of the High Modernists of the early twentieth-century as well; increasing access to education and a huge growth in literacy, with more and more people able to read literary works; the extension of the vote through a series of political reform acts, culminating in the enfranchisement of women in 1918 (for women over 30, expanded to all women over age 21 in 1928); the passage of child labor laws; and a dramatic increase in life expectancy. All of this—and much more of note—unfolded in the course of three human lifespans of 80 years laid end to end (2025– 240 = 1785). In literature, these roughly two and a half centuries saw, in the Romantic Period (1776 to 1832), the most dazzling cluster of poets of genius since the Elizabethan age; in the Victorian Age (1830-1901) the rise of the novel, which eclipsed poetry as the dominant mode of literary production and consumption; and in the twentieth century, the increasing complexity of both poetry and fiction as the project of exploring the inner workings of consciousness inaugurated by poets like Wordsworth (who had declared “the Mind of Man” to be “My haunt, and the main region of my song”) intensified, in the age of Sigmund Freud (who published The Interpretation of Dreams in 1899), playing out in the interiority that characterizes such landmarks of High Modernism as T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and “The Waste Land” and the novels of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. Our aim in this course will be first and foremost to read with understanding and appreciation a small selection of literary works that exemplify the evolution of British literature during this period of accelerating and sweeping transformation of human life.

We will privilege quality over quantity, focusing on close reading of a limited number of works, and most class periods will be devoted to discussion, punctuated by mini-lectures when necessary. Therefore, it is expected that students will attend all classes and complete all readings on time as assigned.

There will be regular quick quizzes on readings (average grade on those quizzes--lowest quiz grade dropped--constitutes 15% of the final grade); four reading response papers (400 to 600 words each, 40% of the final grade); a mid-term exam (20% of the final grade) and a final exam (25% of the final grade).