English 45B

Other Readings and Media

Bront�, E.: Wuthering Heights ;Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. C:The Restoration and the Eighteenth Century;Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. D: The Romantic Period; Shelley, M.: Frankenstein

Description

This course traces the expansion and transformation of English literature, from an insular cultural form to an incipient global fact, from a writing produced in England to a writing produced in English. We will begin in the wake of one civil war, in England , and end on the threshold of another, in the United States . Along the way, we will pass through the Enlightenment and though the turmoil produced by several revolutions: English, Glorious, mercantile, bourgeois, American, French, and industrial, among others. Through it all, we will attend to some of the ways in which poetic and other literary forms revise and readapt older traditions of English writing to new historical circumstances, both at home and across the Atlantic , often constructing the forms and categories that shape our own situation in the process. Our reading will include some of the major figures of the Augustan age, the eighteenth century, the Romantic movement, the early Victorian period, and a nascent American literature.