ENL 2022 – Spring 2027 – Bliss

The nineteenth and twentieth centuries were turbulent ones in Britain, and in many ways they were the centuries that laid the foundation for the world we experience today. The British Empire was gradually expanding to encompass 25% of the total landmass on the planet, and the Industrial revolution and later World Wars changed the ways British people lived and read. This semester, our goal is twofold: to study what British people were reading and writing in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and to understand how they read. Part of this will involve reading novels, short stories, and poetry in pairings that cross class divisions. By pairing together critically-acclaimed authors like Charlotte Bronte with popular ‚"hack" authors like James Malcom Rymer, for example, we'll see the how British Literature was shaping all layers of society. We'll also think about the impact of newspapers, circulating libraries, and later Penguin classes altered how British literature was read, and what it meant. To the Victorians, for example, a novel might look less like a modern book, and more like a year's worth of magazines that published a couple of chapters each issue. Reading might look less like quiet introspection, and more like communal gatherings to hear books read aloud to people who otherwise couldn't afford them. As we move from the early nineteenth century into the twentieth, we'll collectively articulate how British literature molded ongoing debates in their culture and shaped their national identity.
This course fulfills the State-Mandated Writing (W) requirement.