[ENGL 601] British Literature after Romanticism

Course Title: British Literature after Romanticism

Course Description

This course intends to acquaint students with representative texts from diverse literary traditions and cultural landscapes from the Victorian Age to the twentieth century and beyond.

Learning Outcomes

Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to:

• Analyze representative literary texts from the Victorian Age to the contemporary period.
• Contextualize texts by connecting them to the changing cultural, social, and economic dynamics.
• Interpret the interplay between an author's life and work.

Course Contents

Unit I: The Victorian Period (12 Hours)

1. Context: Norton Introduction to The Victorian Age
2. Thomas Carlyle, "The Everlasting No"; "Democracy"
3. Alfred Lord Tennyson, "Ulysses"; "The Passing of Arthur"
4. Robert Browning, "Porphyria's Lover"; "Fra Lippo Lippi"
5. Emily Brontë, "I am Happiest When Most Away"
6. Matthew Arnold, "Culture and Anarchy", "Dover Beach"
7. Christina Rossetti, "Goblin Market"
8. Charles Dickens, Hard Times (Chapters I-X)
9. G M Hopkins, "Felix Randall"

Unit II: Late Nineteenth Century Voices (9 Hours)

1. Context: Norton Introduction to the Late Nineteenth Century
2. Oscar Wilde, "The Critic as Artist"; "From De Profundis"
3. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, "The Speckled Band"
4. Mary Elizabeth Coleridge, "The Other Side of a Mirror"
5. Rudyard Kipling, "The White Man's Burden"; "If"
6. Bernard Shaw, Major Barbara (Act I and II)

Unit III: Pre-Modern Echoes (9 Hours)

1. Context: Norton Introduction to Voices from World War I
2. Rupert Brooke, "The Soldier"
3. Edward Thomas, "The Cherry Trees"
4. Siegfried Sassoon, "Everyone Sang"
5. Wilfred Owen, "Strange Meeting"; "Disabled"
6. Robert Graves, "Goodbye to All That"

Unit IV: Modernist and Interwar Literature (9 Hours)

1. Context: Norton Introduction to Modern Manifestos & WWII
2. F.S. Flint and Ezra Pound, "Imagisme: A Few Don'ts by an Imagiste"
3. William Butler Yeats, "Byzantium"; "Easter 1916"
4. Virginia Woolf, "Professions for Women"; "Modern Fiction"
5. James Joyce, "Araby"
6. T.S. Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"; "Tradition and the Individual Talent"

Unit V: Contemporary Voices (9 Hours)

1. Context: Norton Introduction to Contemporary Voices
2. Wole Soyinka, "Telephone Conversation"
3. Salman Rushdie, "English is an Indian Literary Language"
4. Doris Lessing, "To Room Nineteen"
5. Harold Pinter, "The Dumb Waiter"
6. Chinua Achebe, "From an Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness"
7. J.M. Coetzee, from Waiting for the Barbarians

Evaluation Scheme

Internal Evaluation

External Examination

Prescribed Text

Greenblatt, Stephen, ed. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. 9th ed., vol. E, 2012.