English 45B

Book List

Austen, Jane: Pride and Prejudice; Defoe, Daniel: Robinson Crusoe; Fielding, Henry: Joseph Andrews; Gay, John: The Beggar's Opera; Melville, Herman: Billy Budd and Other Stories (Bartleby and Benito Cereno); Pope, Alexander: Selected Poetry; Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft: Frankenstein; Whitman, Walt: Leaves of Grass, 1855 edition; Wordsworth, William: The Major Works, including The Prelude

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 cross the Atlantic and pass through the turmoil of several revolutions. Through it all, we will attend to some of the ways in which emergent literary forms--poetic, novelistic, and otherwise--revise and readapt older traditions to new historical circumstances, often constructing the forms and categories that shape our own historical situation in the process. Our reading will include such figures as Dryden, Pope, Gay, Swift, Fielding, Johnson, Gray, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Austen, Mary Shelley, Emerson, Melville, and Whitman.

Please note that this class will first meet on Wednesday, September 4; discussion sections will not start being held until Friday, September 6.