Department of English

This course will trace the development of British literature across the 20th century. We will read English and Irish literature in a variety of genres, including fiction, poetry, and drama. Discussions will focus on British colonialism, the first and second world wars, changing attitudes toward sexuality, the conflict between the individual self and societyal or familial expectations, and the role and function of the literary arts across this century. As we near the end of the 20th century, its literature will serve as a means of understanding and analyzing the phenomenal changes that have occurred in it, and to define what this century has come to signify for world and literary history. Readings will include works by Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, Joseph Conrad, G.B. Shaw, Seamus Heaney, Eavan Boland, D.M. Thomas, and Jeanette Winterson. There will be one short mid-term paper, and one longer paper. No exams scheduled.