LIT 3124

This course is a survey of literature from the Romantic period (c. 1800) to the present. You will be introduced to a wide range of authors and texts from a variety of genres and settings. You will learn how to analyze major formal, philosophical, political, cultural, and aesthetic aspects of the works, ask what effects they have had, what social understandings they assumed, and what meanings they had and still have in the present. The course’s emphasis is not only on impactful and recognized texts but also texts that have significant thematic emphases, historical interest, and/or represent literary innovation. Focusing on authors and cultural contexts, we will learn how to identify and interpret characteristics of artistic movements or social practices important to literary development. Authors and topics studied will in include: Mary Shelley, the Romantic poets, George Eliot, Walt Whitman, Oscar Wilde, Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, modernist and Harlem Renaissance literature, Chinua Achebe, Postcolonial Caribbean Poetry, Agha Shahid Ali, Flash Fiction, and Mohsin Hamid.