LIT 3124 Fall 2020 Kennedy

This course surveys literature written in English from 1800 to the present. We’ll study landmark moments and movements in literary history across a range of genres (fiction, autobiographical narrative, essay, poetry, drama,), authors, and audiences. No course can offer a comprehensive view of this immense field, but you’ll gain a better understanding of some major approaches to writing and reading as English-speaking authors experimented with new (and old) techniques and ideas. We’ll learn to distinguish Romanticism and romance, sentimentalism and sensationalism, realism and naturalism, modernism and postmodernism. We’ll sketch out the relations between British writing and its others in Britain’s long imperial shadow: in America, the Commonwealth countries, and Anglophone countries in Africa, the Caribbean, South Asia, and South America. The course will help you track English literary history by mapping significant features both formally, in the text, and culturally, outside the text. We’ll examine developing models of education and voice, definitions of home and away, and distinctions between history and modernity (or tradition and innovation) in light of the changing roles of gender, sexuality, race, nation, empire, and diaspora.