COURSE OBJECTIVES
This is a survey course designed to introduce, in lecture format, the history of English literature written on the British Isles from the 1890s to the 1960s, highlighting the major periods, genres, oeuvres and individual works of the era.
COURSE CONTENT
Aesthetic and poetic concerns of the late Victorian and turn-of-the-century decades and their manifestation in the various genres (Pater, Wilde, James); modernist trends in the novel (Conrad, Joyce, Woolf); modernism and its antecedents in poetry (Hardy, Yeats, Eliot); prose fiction and modernity at mid-century (Huxley, Orwell); satire, metaphysics, and moral philosophy in the post World War II novel (Murdoch, Golding); dramatic revival on the British Isles and the theatre of the absurd (Synge, Beckett, Pinter); the poetry of the Auden-generation and Dylan Thomas; representatives of post WWII poetry (Larkin).
WEEKLY SYLLABUS
REQUIRED READING
FICTION
H. JAMES, The Turn of the Screw (1898)
J. CONRAD, Heart of Darkness (1899/1902)J. JOYCE, "The Dead", "Araby" and "Eveline" or "After the Race" (both the first and the second; one of the last two: 3 altogether) from Dubliners (1914)
E. M. FORSTER, Howards End (1910) or D. H. LAWRENCE, The Rainbow (1915)
V. WOOLF, Mrs Dalloway (1925)
A. HUXLEY, Brave New World (1932)
G. ORWELL, Nineteen Eighty-four (1949) (one of the previous two dystopias)M. SPARK, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961)
D. LESSING, The Grass Is Singing (1962)
DRAMA
J. M. SYNGE, The Playboy of the Western World(1907)S. BECKETT, Waiting for Godot(1952/1954)/
H. PINTER, The Caretaker (1959)
POETRY
THOMAS HARDY (1840-1928) “A Broken Appointment”, “The Darkling Thrush”, “In Tenebris I (Wintertime nights)”, “Afterwards”WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS (1865-1939) “The Lake Isle of Innisfree”, “The Second Coming”, “Sailing to Byzantium”, “Leda and the Swan”, “The Circus Animals’ Desertion”T. S ELIOT (1888-1965) “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, “Preludes”, “Ash-Wednesday”W. H. AUDEN (1907-1973) “As I Walked Out One Evening”, “In Praise of Limestone”, “The Shield of Achilles”DYLAN THOMAS (1914-1953) “And Death Shall Have No Dominion”, “A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London”, “Fern Hill”, “Do Not Go gentle into That Good NightPHILIP LARKIN (1922-1985) “Church Going”, “The Whitsun Weddings”, “High Windows”, “Sad Steps”RECOMMENDED PRIMARY SOURCES
H. JAMES, The Portrait of a Lady(1881)
J. JOYCE, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)
W. GOLDING, Lord of the Flies (1954)
I. MURDOCH, Under the Net (1954)
G. B. SHAW. Saint Joan (1921-1923) RECOMMENDED SECONDARY SOURCESGeneral
Daiches, David. A Critical History of English Literature. Vol. 2. London: Mandarin, 1994.
Coot, Stephen.The Penguin Short History of English LiteratureHaemondsworth: Penguin, 1993.
Dodsworth, Martin, ed. The Penguin History of Literature. Vol. 7. The Twentieth Century. London: Penguin, 1990.
Sanders, Andrew. The Short Oxford History of English Literature. New York : Oxford University Press, 1994.
Selected websites:
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[For primary texts:] http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/, http://www.bartleby.com/
Novel
Bényei Tamás. Az ártatlan ország: Az angol regény 1945 után. Debrecen: Kossuth Egyetemi Kiadó, 2003.
Bradbury, Malcolm. The Modern British Novel. London: Secker & Warburg, 1993.
Hewitt, Douglas. English Fiction of the Early Modern Period, 1890-1940. London: Longman, 1988.
MacKay, Marina and Lyndsey Stonebridge, eds. British Fiction After Modernism: The Novel at Mid-Century. Houndmills: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2007.
Stevenson, Randall. Modernist Fiction: An Introduction. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992.
Drama
Brustein, Robert. The Theatre of Revolt: An Approach to the Modern Drama. London: Methuen, 1965.
Dietrich, Richard F. British Drama, 1890-1950: A Critical History. Boston: Twayne, 1989.
Esslin, Martin. The Theatre of the Absurd. London : Methuen, 2001.
Fischer-Lichte, E.: A dráma története. Jelenkor: Pécs, 2001.
Gascoigne, Bamber, Twentieth Century Drama. London, Hutchinson: 1962.
Innes, Christopher. Modern British Drama, 1890-1990. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992.
–-. Modern British Drama: The Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002.
Poetry
Ellmann, Richard and O’Clair, Robert, eds.: The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry. New York, London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1988
Eliot, T. S.: Tradition and the Individual Talent. In: Kermode, Frank, ed.: Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot. London: Faber & Faber, 1975, pp 37-44Ford, Boris, ed.: The Pelican Guide to English Literature. Vol. 7. From James to Eliot. London: Penguin Books Ltd., 1996, pp 150-165, 166-179, 230-254, 443-461, 462-478Ford, Boris, ed.: The Pelican Guide to English Literature. Vol. 8. The Present. London: Penguin Books Ltd., 1990, pp 209-223, 281-293, 294-313Dodsworth, Martin, ed.: The Penguin History of Literature. Vol. 7. The Twentieth Century. London: Penguin Books Ltd., 1990, pp 33-64, 109-144, 195-224, 267-314, 345-374WEBSITESwww.poemhunter.com www.poets.orgwww.online-literature.com