Modern British and Irish Fiction

Catalog description

This course investigates novels written in the British Isles before 1945, with focus on the interrelation between literary technique and the social realities inhabited by British writers over the first half of the twentieth century. While there will be no single, unifying thread connecting every work we read during the semester, we will examine a variety of prose fiction works (novels and short stories), as well as occasionally glance sideways at other non-prose fiction forms (poems, essays, literary and radio recordings), in order to follow the stylistic negotiations and mutations undergone in the literary field during these years. By keeping track of changes to both the form and content of literary works, we will necessarily attend to the social, political, and technological transformations that mark the period and that, indeed, provide the lineaments for how we continue to think about being modern. Specific authors may include Oscar Wilde, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, and Samuel Beckett.