Conditions of England

Catalog description

This course will examine how writers and artists have imagined and represented British society in fiction and film from 1848 to the present. The "condition of England" novels of the mid-nineteenth-century famously advanced the idea that a work of literature could aim to capture the nature of society as a whole, and, in particular, to convey the relationship between different social classes within England. Is it possible for a single novel, or film, or painting to represent society as a whole, or to show a nation to itself? What are the opportunities, and the pitfalls, of this kind of artistic project? We'll look at how this kind of project develops across two hundred years of British culture, from Victorian realism to contemporary multicultural fiction and film. Possible authors include Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Dickens, George Orwell, Virginia Woolf, Mike Leigh, Stephen Frears, Zadie Smith.