9:30A-10:45A MW (30) 3 cr

OPEN TO MAJORS ONLY.  DECLARED MINORS OBTAIN AUTHORIZATION FROM
BH402.

Representative selections, with emphasis on major writers from
Blake to the present and on their cultural context.  We will
especially concentrate on how writing is implicated in some
important historical moments in the past 200 years:  ideas about
and responses to revolution at the turn of the 18th century;
ideas of culture and literacy in the middle of the increasingly
industrialized and democratic 19th century; the culture of
modernism and the First World War; the condition of England and
the end of empire in the second half of the 20th century.=20
Although most of the reading will be in British writers and the
NORTON ANTHOLOGY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, we will read and talk
about some American writing about the revolution and the First
World War, and the fiction of some recent writers who make
literature in English outside England (Salman Rushdie and Nadine
Gordimer, for example). Weekly short written responses to the
reading.  Three relatively short (4-5) page papers during the
semester. A final examination. =20