Topics in Modern British Literature cancelled
The Modernist period was one of great experimentation. Novelists and poets alike believed that the tumultuous period in which they lived required a new way of writing; and they struggled to find new forms, new language, to capture experience in this reconceived world. In recent years scholars have been given the opportunity to watch this experimentation in progress through the publication of facsimiles of important Modernist manuscripts. This semester we shall examine three texts available in facsimile form: James Joyce's Ulysses, T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, and Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse. We shall begin by examining each completed work and then go back into the manuscripts to see where additions, excisions, revisions reveal the development of the final version. Frequent oral reports, one major paper, and a willingness to spend considerable amounts of time in the library (the full Ulysses facsimile is far too expensive for a student to purchase and that of To the Lighthouse is no longer in print) will be required of all students in this class.