11:15A-12:30P  TR  (30) 3 cr

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

Although the intellectual and literary movements we will be surveying in this course are labeled
"Romanticism," "The Victorian Age" and "Modernism," we might well be said to be witnessing
the birth of the modern world itself.  Among the innovations, good and ill, of the period we will
be discussing are industrialization, the widespread technologization of everyday life, class
consciousness and universal suffrage (in the twentieth century).  Surveying the English literature
of the last two centuries will suggest a variety of responses to these and other issues.  Therefore,
throughout the semester we will read texts with the "double vision" proper to historic surveys,
keeping one eye on those features of a work which situate it in its intellectual and historical
contexts, opening the other eye to literature's constant relevance to our own time and experience.
THE NORTON INTRODUCTION TO ENGLISH LITERATURE, vol. 2, will be supplemented
with two appropriate novels.

Required work will include three interpretive essays, a mid-term and a final.