English 3808 Modern British Literature
Section 001 CRN 90812
Hoberman
Modern British Literature 1400-1515 TR
Modern British literature tries to make sense of a world very much like our own – a world of political, social, and religious upheaval. World Wars I and II, Irish nationalism, class conflict, feminism, Freudianism, and widespread revolt against European imperialism were some of the historical factors to which British writers responded. In doing so, writers like Conrad, Yeats, Lawrence, Joyce, Rhys, and Woolf produced an extraordinary outburst of brilliant writing – writing that managed to be both technically innovative and profoundly relevant to the questions people still ask about what constitutes selfhood, how men and women can best relate to each other, what makes life worthwhile. We’ll read works by these writers and others in an attempt to understand how their experiments with characterization, style, and narrative technique helped them answer old questions in new ways. Requirements: careful reading, two papers, frequent brief writing assignments, midterm, and final. (Group 3C)
