Unit information: Literature 4: 1830 to 1945 in 2010/11

Unit name	Literature 4: 1830 to 1945
Unit code	ENGL39023
Credit points	20
Level of study	H/6
Teaching block(s)	Teaching Block 2 (weeks 13 - 24)
Unit director	Dr. James
Open unit status	Not open
Pre-requisites	None
Co-requisites	None
School/department	Department of English
Faculty	Faculty of Arts

Description including Unit Aims

Some major authors of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries will be studied. Poets to be covered will include, for instance, Tennyson, Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, Clough, Hopkins, Hardy, Yeats, Eliot, Auden; novelists and prose writers will include, for instance, the Bront's, Thackeray, Dickens, George Eliot, Hardy, James, Conrad, Ford, Lawrence, Joyce, Forster, Woolf, Bowen; and dramatists will include, for instance, Wilde.

Aims:

The aim of this unit is to give students a grounding in literature of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to introduce them to major authors, influential texts and literary movements, and in particular to develop students ways of understanding and describing the distinctive qualities of important writers of the period.

Intended Learning Outcomes

Learning outcomes will include: a greatly enhanced knowledge of the literature of the period; the ability to develop and express, in lucid and accurate prose, cogent arguments in essays; the ability to select and analyse pertinent passages from literary texts that support such arguments; the ability to make intelligent use of secondary criticism and theoretical perspectives (where appropriate); mastery of the technical vocabulary and analytical tools of literary criticism.

Teaching Information

3 x 1-hour lectures and 1 x 1-hour tutorial per week, plus one-to-one discussion in Consultation Hours, where desired.

Assessment Information

2 x 2,000 word summative essays (50% each).

Reading and References

• Joseph Bristow, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)

• Robin Gilmour, The Victorian Period: The Intellectual and Cultural Context of English Literature 1830-1890 (New York: Longman, 1993)

• Douglas Hewitt, English Fiction of the Early Modern Period: 18901940 (London: Longman, 1988)

• Pericles Lewis, The Cambridge Introduction to Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007)

• Michael Wheeler, English Fiction of the Victorian Period: 18301890, 2nd edn (London: Longman, 1994).