Current course offerings

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Course description

This course introduces students to major works of literature from the 1850s to the first decades of the twentieth century. This period of dramatic change, as Britain moved rapidly from a predominantly rural economy to become an urbanised, industrialised nation will be discussed alongside key issues such as transforming attitudes about Christianity, evolution, and scientific materialism; gender, sexuality and the role of women; changing social and community relations; debates about democracy and the role of Empire; and the development of new sciences, technologies, and psychologies. We will consider how such writers as George Eliot, Henry James, Oscar Wilde, and Virginia Woolf addressed and reflected such issues in their work, across various genres including the novel, drama, the short story, the poem and the essay. We will also consider how the literature of this period relates to the Romanticism that preceded it and we will consider the forces of Modernism that transformed Victorian and Edwardian aesthetics.

Archived offerings