This is an opportunity to study many classic works of
British and American—poetry, fiction, and essays. The course covers three major
consecutive periods in the canon of British and American literary history–Restoration/Eighteenth-Century,
British and American Romanticism, and Nineteenth-Century British Victorian/American
Realism—examining the important authors and representative works of each
period.
The particular works we study have been chosen because they
best characterize the major literature of each period, with a view to exploring
how authors writing in the same historical
framework both mirror and depart philosophically one from another. We will also compare and contrast the literary
periods themselves and consider how they position themselves culturally, historically,
and politically; we will pay particular attention to the ways in which each
period emerged as a reaction against
the period before.
Required Texts
(available as a course packet)
Authors include Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, Samuel
Johnson, Jonathan Edwards, William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor
Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David
Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Edgar Allen Poe, Thomas Carlyle,
John Stuart Mill, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett
Browning, Mathew Arnold, Oscar Wilde, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Christina
Rossetti, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Henry James, Mark Twain, and Stephen
Crane.
Course Requirements
Because the reading in this course is so intensive and the
breadth of material so wide, there are no outside papers required for this
course. Instead, following the study of
each of the three literary periods there will be a major examination in two
parts. One part will be IDENTIFICATION,
which primarily involves the students responding in paragraph form to selected
passages from the reading, and the second will be ESSAY where students will
bring in works of their own choosing from the material studied in response to a
comprehensive question about the period.