Literature of Anglophone Countries is a course designed to give students a brief overview of English and American literature throughout the centuries with a focus mainly on the Romantic and Modernist periods. Representative works from the periods are studied and analysed in depth. The course examines areas such as the elements of the short story, play and poetry, literary devices and style, pragmatics, narrative and genre, as well as the socio-cultural and aesthetic context of the eras.

On completing the course students will:

• Recognise and engage with the major literary forms of the short story, play and poetry 
• Become familiar with key periods, authors and works of English and American Literature
• Demonstrate a strong knowledge of the key texts, and the different ways to approach them
• ‘Close read’ different kinds of texts, understanding the importance of rigorous analysis and close attention to detail
• Become sensitized to the literary effect particular linguistic choices may have
• Develop their critical thinking skills through textual analysis and construction of arguments 
• Demonstrate essay-writing, bibliographic and research skills
• Employ appropriate critical and theoretical terms in their own writing

1. Course Overview - Critical perspectives on literature
2. Introduction to Romanticism
3. Early Romantic Poetry - William Wordsworth and S.T. Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads
   Close reading of selected poem
4. Late Romantic PoetryKeats, Byron, Shelley – Close Reading of Selected Poems
5. Wordsworth’s ‘Preface to the Lyrical Ballads’
6. American Romanticism - Dark Romanticism - Edgar Allan Poe
7. American Romanticism - Dark Romanticism - Herman Melville
8. Proto-Modernist Voices - The Poetry of Emily Dickinson
9. Introduction to Modernism
10. Virginia Woolf as a critic and an essayist
11. The modernist novel: The work of Virginia Woolf
12. The modernist novel: The work of James Joyce
13. American Theater: Tennessee Williams – The Glass Menagerie
14. American Theater: Tennessee Williams – The Glass Menagerie
15. Course Review

Reading

Excerpts on the Romantic Period and Modernism from: Greenblatt, Stephen, gen. ed. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. 9th ed. Vol. 2. New York: Norton, 2012.

Recommended Reading

Theory and Context:

Barry, Peter. Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory. 3rd  Ed. Manchester University Press, 2009.

Peck, John and Martin Coyle. A Brief History of English Literature . 2nd  Ed. Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

Romanticism: 

Canuel, Mark, British Romanticism: Criticism and Debates. Routledge, 2015.

Curran, Stuart, The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism. Cambridge University Press, 2010.

Day, Aidan. Romanticism. 2nd  Ed. Routledge, 2011.

Moore, Jane, and John Strachan. Key Concepts in Romantic Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.

Wu, Duncan, ed. A Companion to Romanticism. Ed. Duncan Wu. Blackwell, 1998.

Watson J.R. English Poetry of the Romantic Period 1789-1830. Routledge, 2014

Modernism: 

Bradbury, Malcolm and James McFarlane, eds. Modernism: A Guide to European Literature 1890

-1930. Penguin Books, 1991.

Bradshaw, David. A Companion to Modernist Literature and Culture. Blackwell, 2006.

Goldman, Jane. The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf: An Introduction, Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Marcus, Laura. Virginia Woolf, Northcote House Publishers, 2004.

Levenson, Michael, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Modernism. New York: Cambridge UP, 1999.

Nicholls, Peter. Modernisms: A Literary Guide. London: Macmillan, 1995.

Seidel, Michael. James Joyce: A Short Introduction, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2002.

Stevenson, Randall. Modernist Fiction. New York: Prentice Hall, 1997.

Edgar Allan Poe: 

Hayes, K. The Cambridge companion to Edgar Allan Poe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Fisher, B. The Cambridge introduction to Edgar Allan Poe. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008.

Emily Dickinson:

Larson, Kerry,  The Cambridge Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Poetry. Cambridge University Press, 2011

Tennessee Williams: 

Krasner, David, A Companion to Twentieth-Century American Drama. Wiley, 2008

The course is based on a hybrid model of interactive lecturing and close reading workshop. Dialogue and discussion with students is encouraged, and there will be short practical activities that students will complete in groups in class that practice elements of practical criticism and stylistic analysis. Visual material are used to introduce contextual elements and key passages. Class handouts with selected excerpts from primary, as well as secondary sources, will assist the lecturing and learning process.

Course resources (slides, class handouts and selected secondary readings) will be made available to students though the e-class platform.  

Use of PPT slides  / Use of E-class  and E-assignments.

The course is assessed through a research paper that asks students to think about issues of culture and context, genre, language and stylistic issues, and how these inform the works we have studied.