English 126

Book List

Conrad, Joseph: Lord Jim; Joyce, James: Ulysses; Rhys, Jean: Good Morning, Midnight; Woolf, Virginia: Mrs. Dalloway

Description

In this course, we will examine British and Irish literature from the turn of the twentieth century through the aftermath of World War II. This was a period of tremendous turmoil and thoroughgoing change in Britain, Ireland, and the world. Looking at a handful of the most significant texts from this period, we will investigate how they register and refract those massive political and cultural shifts, how we might characterize British and Irish literature within the larger rubrics of literary and artistic modernism, and how writers reckoned with such large-scale changes by locating new ways to pressurize, reroute, scramble, and evade inherited forms, modes, and genres. Along with the novels by Conrad, Joyce, Rhys, and Woolf listed above, we will also read poems and essays by Thomas Hardy, W.B. Yeats, Mina Loy, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, W.H. Auden, Stevie Smith, Derek Walcott, and Philip Larkin. These shorter texts will be available electronically and in a reader.