ENG 206 Survey of English Literature: Victorian to Postcolonial
Lecture Hours: 4
Credits: 4
Surveys selected, representative readings of English literature from 1832 through the twentieth century, including works from nations colonized by Britain. Situates literature as the product of specific historical contexts. Requires careful reading. Fosters thoughtful interpretation, analysis, and appreciation of literature. Emphasizes genre, structure, characterization, imagery, and theme. Uses critical essays to explore assigned texts and to examine issues of class, gender, race, nation, imperialism, government, and the “other” in these texts and in this time period.
Prerequisite: Placement into WR 121Z ; or WR 115 with a grade of C or better; or consent of instructor.
Student Learning Outcomes:
- Name the major authors and texts and explain the major ideas and themes in English Literature from 1832 to the late 20th century.
- Read a literary work at a literal level: accurately describe genre, subject, structure, style, theme, character, and setting.
- Read a literary work at a figurative level: recognize literary devices and identify their function within a particular text and among different texts.
- Read a literary work at a critical level: question, interpret, analyze, synthesize, and evaluate.
- Situate literature from the various periods covered in this course within their socio-historical and biographical contexts. Demonstrate awareness of the importance of race, nation, class, gender, time, and place in shaping a given text.
- Describe the cultural, social, and political functions of literature.
- Identify the cultural, social, political contexts that give rise to literary critical lenses and be able to identify how different lenses affect interpretation of texts.
- Use discussion to create reading communities within the classroom (online or face-to-face).
- Articulate and defend plausible interpretations of texts and the ideas of major critics.
- Examine the way their own experiences, expectations, and historical moment shape their readings of texts; employ literary theory to identify their approaches to literature and understand other approaches.
- Write critical analyses of literary works, including at least one analytical essay that uses MLA style documentation and paper format.
Statewide General Education Outcomes:
- Interpret and engage in the Arts and Letters, making use of the creative process to enrich the quality of life.
- Critically analyze values and ethics within a range of human experience and expression to engage more fully in local and global issues.
Cultural Literacy (DPR) Outcome:
- Identify and analyze complex practices, values, and beliefs and the culturally and historically defined meanings of difference.
Content Outline
- Close Reading
- Attention to detail
- Notetaking and highlighting
- Responding to texts informally and formally
- Historical and Social Contexts
- Definitions: England and Englishness
- Victorian Britain
- Chartism
- Industrialism
- Political Economy
- The Woman Question
- Science
- Empire
- Late Victorian Britain
- Aestheticism
- The New Girl
- Early 20th-century Britain
- Class structure
- Empire
- Modernist movements
- The Great War
- Mid- to late 20th-century Britain
- Postcolonialism
- Conditions of publication and copyright
- Literacy
- Gender
- Class
- Religion
- Science
- Literary Terminology and Language
- Literary Criticism and Theory
- Methods of Literary Analysis
- Discussion
- Conventions of the Literary Essay
- Establishing a thesis
- Incorporating details from a text, including quotes
- Research
- Scholarly sources
- Norton Online materials
- Incorporating and documenting information from other sources
- MLA format and style
- The “Canon”
- Definitions of “major” authors and works
- Who decides what is English Literature?
- Literary Periods, Movements, and Genres
- Victorian Poetry
- Tennyson
- Selected poems
- In Memoriam
- E. B. Browning
- Browning
- Arnold
- The Pre-Raphaelites
- Selected poems
- Selected paintings
- Christina Rossetti
- Swinburne
- Hopkins
- Sprung rhythm
- Curtal sonnet
- Instress and inscape
- Victorian Nonfiction
- Carlyle
- Newman
- Ruskin
- Eliot
- Pater
- Political Economy
- The Woman Question
- Mill
- Ellis
- Besant
- Nightingale
- Science
- The Novel
- Definitions
- Fiction
- Narrative
- Verisimilitude
- Character
- Plot
- Setting
- Complexity
- Readers and audience
- Victorian Novel
- Serial publication
- Mudie’s lending library
- Dickens
- Selected excerpts or an entire novel
- Sensation Novel
- Selected excerpts or an entire novel
- Industrial Novel
- Selected excerpts or an entire novel
- 20th-century Novel
- Selected excerpts or an entire novel
- Late 19th-Century Literature
- Stevenson
- Hardy
- Wilde
- Art for art’s sake
- The Importance of Being Earnest
- Elements of drama
- Farce
- Social critique
- Kipling
- Doyle
- Conrad
- Heart of Darkness
- Imagery
- Narration
- Gender
- “Civilization” and “savagery”
- Empire
- Achebe, “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness”
- Postcolonialism
- World War I Poetry
- Realism
- Irony
- Owen
- Sassoon
- Selected other poems
- Modern Poetry
- Modernism
- Newness
- Point of view
- Time
- Limitations of Consciousness
- Form
- Pound
- Yeats
- Ireland
- Occasional poems
- Nationalism
- Myth and mythmaking
- Selected poems
- Eliot
- Difficulty
- Fragmentation, alienation, dislocation
- Allusions
- Mythology
- “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
- The Waste Land
- Modern Fiction
- Joyce
- Ireland
- Modernism
- Realism
- Psychological description
- Epiphany
- Selection(s) from Dubliners, usually “The Dead”
- Other Modern Texts
- Woolf
- Orwell
- Other selected texts (Forster, Lawrence, Mansfield, Rhys)
- 20th-Century Poetry
- Auden
- Thomas
- Walcott
- Heaney
- Other selected poets
- 20th-Century Drama
- Selected Play or Plays (Beckett, Stoppard, Pinter)
- 20th-Century Fiction
- Selected novel or short story
- Postcolonial Literature
- Rushdie
- Ngugi
- Soyinka
- The Other
- Other selected authors and texts
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