English 222-001
English Writers: The Modern Period
Instr: Robert Marini
Office: CRT 535, 229-5041
e-mail: marini@uwm.edu
Office hours: by appointment.
Course Information: MW 3:30-4:45, Business N130
Course Description
This course will offer a broad range of texts designed to provide an overview of the major literary periods in modern, English literature: Romanticism, The Victorian period, and Modernisim. The continuously changing face of England from the early nineteenth-century onward provides the backdrop for a wonderfully rich assortment of literary texts. With the French Revolution as the great instigator of change, we can trace throughout the literature of the times the growing concerns and anxieties the English experienced as their predominantly rural and agrarian landscape quickly transformed into an urban, industrial society. A crisis of identity seized a people now stripped of centuries old traditions and institutions. At the turn of the century, political organization and increasing technological advancements made it possible for power to be wielded in ways the would have stunned the imaginations of previous generations. From horse and musket to the atom bomb in just a few generations, technology became increasingly problematic to a society locked in the midst of the cold war.
The class will combine close readings of the texts with a study of the historical and cultural backgrounds of the times. We will explore a variety of genres--poetry, short stories, and novels--so that we might better understand how different literary forms treated similar issues in their own unique way.
Possible Course Texts:
The Norton Anthology of English Literature Vol. 2.
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein
George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
Julian Barnes, A History of the World in 10&1/2 Chapters
