LI 476/676 Early Twentieth-Century British Literature
Early Twentieth-Century British Literature surveys a range
of literature (fiction, poetry, drama) from the 1890s to the present. Except for Hare’s Plenty and a selection of poems from Eavan Boland,
both of which function as a postmodern counterpoint to the literature we are
reading, the selections fall into what is frequently called “modernism.”
The moderns are rebels: they desire to break free from the constraints
of a Victorian past, and they do so both in their lives and in their art. We will be examining how these writers challenge
the then-current definitions of race, empire, mass culture, gender, sexuality,
and spirituality. We will examine as
well how these challenges result in artistic experimentation—in different styles
of writing or different ways of performing art. At the end of the nineteenth century, uncertainty
is the norm; paralleling this uncertainty is a sea change in the novel—gone is
the all knowing, omniscient author the nineteenth-century novel. Thus, a change
in world vision results in changed artistic expression. We will begin with
Oscar Wilde, who notoriously flaunts prescribed norms, and we will end with
David Hare who queries modernist experimentation.
The reading selection will include:
Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray.
Joseph Conrad, Heart
of Darkness
James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse,
D. H. Lawrence, "The Fox,"
Forster, A Passage to
David Hare’s Plenty
Selected poetry from W. B. Yeats and T. S Eliot
This course fulfills the requirement for late British
literature.