Great Britain: Literature, Art, and Culture

Catalog description

Great Britain is a country with a rich literary and artistic history. In this course, we will study how the country’s arts - literature, painting, architecture, landscape architecture, and music – were shaped by and, in turn, reflected the country’s history and culture. Using the arts as a mirror, we will see how the eighteenth-century Industrial Revolution changed Great Britain from a rural, agricultural society to an increasingly urban, wealthy, socially mobile, technological one. We will watch the rise and fall of the global British Empire. Changing gender roles will be examined, along with the many other social changes that occurred as Great Britain transformed itself into a modern society. Writers to be studied include Wordsworth, Blake, Austen, Tennyson, Kipling, Wilde, and Woolf.