This course surveys writers from 1660 through to the twentieth century. A variety of literary forms and themes are examined as we move from the Restoration to the modern era.
Credits: 3
Hours: 45 (Lecture Hours: 3)
Total Weeks: 15
Prerequisites:
Any two of ENGL 100 Academic Writing, ENGL 105 Non-Fictional Prose, ENGL 111 Poetry and Drama, or ENGL 112 Prose Fiction
Non-Course Prerequisites:
None
Co-requisites:
None
Course Content:
English Literature II” introduces students to the major literary movements that have shaped English literature since the restoration of Charles II in 1660. We will concentrate on close readings of representative works that are primarily but not exclusively canonical and that reflect the achievements of English literature from the end of the Restoration period in 1660 through to the early twentieth century.
We will read spirited texts that revel in the end to Puritan rule in England and subsequent satirical works of the Augustan era that register the competing tensions between neo-classicism’s rigid literary rules and, paradoxically, themes of the filth, unruliness, and disorder of a nation struggling to see itself as such. We will read of the late eighteenth century cultural backlash against the ideals of restraint and politeness and the movement towards a literature of sensibility, and its exaltation of continental upheaval and Revolution, imagination, feeling, cultural primitivism, and natural genius, culminating in a literary time period now known as the “Romantic” era. We will also undertake critical reading of select works penned in the Victorian age and in the early twentieth century, as authors engaged with colonialist expansion, industrialization, urbanization, social mobility, and Empire.
Detailed Topics:
'Introduction to Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Literature
- John Dryden, Mac Flecknoe
- John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, “The Imperfect Enjoyment”
- Aphra Behn, “The Disappointment”
- John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, “A Satyr Against Reason and Mankind”
- Alexander Pope, The Rape of the Lock
- Jonathan Swift, “The Lady’s Dressing Room”
- Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, “The Reasons that Induced Dr. S. to Write a Poem Called ‘The Lady’s Dressing Room’”
- Jonathan Swift, A Modest Proposal
selections from “Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift, D.S.P.D
- Eliza Haywood, Fantomina: Or, Love in a Maze
- Samuel Richardson, from Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded
- Henry Fielding, from An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews
- Thomas Gray, “Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat, Drowned in a tub of Gold Fishes” (2669), “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”
- The Romantics and Their Contemporaries
Introduction to Romantic Literature
- Edmund Burke, from Reflections on the Revolution in France
- Mary Wollstonecraft, from A Vindication of the Rights of Men
- Anna Letitia Barbauld, “Washing-Day”
- William Blake, “The Tyger”; “The CLOD and the PEBBLE”; “The SICK ROSE”; “Ah! Sun-Flower”; "The GARDEN of LOVE”; “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell” from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
- William Wordsworth, “She Dwelt among th’ Untrodden Ways”; “The World is too much with us”; “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Kubla Khan”
- Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Ozymandias”
- John Keats, “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”; “Ode on a Grecian Urn”; “To Autumn”
- Robert Burns, “To a Mouse”; “Flow Gently, Sweet Afton”
- Lord Byron, Don Juan Dedication and Canto 1
The Victorian Age
- Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights
- Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “The Lady of Shalot”; “Ulysses”
- Robert Browning ,“My Last Duchess”
- Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh, Book 1
Twentieth Century
- James Joyce, “The Dead”
- Virginia Woolf, from A Room of One’s Own
- Samuel Beckett, Krapp’s Last Tape
Learning Outcomes:
Upon successful completion of “Survey of English Literature II,” students will be able to:
- Discuss literature in an articulate, academic manner
- Identify and characterize the major movements in English literature post-1660
- Explicate and analyze literary works from a variety of time periods
- Research literary works using academic sources
- Write clear, convincing, creative literary criticism
Grading System: Letters
Passing Grade: D (50%)
Percentage of Individual Work: 100
Additional Course Comments:
A penalty of 5 % will be deducted each day an assignment is late; an alternate due date must be obtained from the instructor prior to the original submission date.
Textbooks:
Textbooks are subject to change. Please contact the bookstore at your local campus for current book lists.