Selected Topics in Anglophone Literature: British and Irish Modernism

Catalog description

Between 1890 and 1930, the British and Irish public experienced a staggering number of social and political upheavals. The Second Boer War, World War I, and the partition of Ireland signaled both the end and the failure of the empire project; the passage of the Representation of the People Act enacted (partial) women’s suffrage; while the rapid transformation of technology and the decline in traditional social, political, and religious values left the public with a sense of alienation and incoherence. Modernist authors valued formal innovation and experimentation in their response to these events, creating a new literature to properly chronicle a fractured modernity. In this course, we will read Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier, Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier, Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, selections from James Joyce’s Dubliners, as well as poetry by T.S. Eliot and W.B. Yeats. At the end of the semester, we will read Zadie Smith’s N/W and reflect on the influence and legacy of this rich artistic period