The course, which includes an international travel component, surveys the literature of the United Kingdom, particularly England from the beginning of the Romantic Period (publication of Lyrical Ballads in 1798) through the Victorian Period and to the Modern and Post Modern Periods. It focuses on the works of major writers of each period (e.g., Romantic—Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Byron, and Keats; Victorian--Dickens, Browning, Tennyson, and Hardy; Modern and Post Modern: Joyce, Yeats, Woolf, Auden, and Pinter) and looks at some of the main historical/cultural movements during these two centuries (e.g., industrialism, evolution, and modernism).
International travel component:
During the international component of the course, a week in England over Spring Break 2015, the students will tour areas where these major writers lived and worked and connect those experiences directly to their course assignments: London―the Dickens’ House/Museum, Keats’ House, and Bloomsbury; Dorchester—Hardy’s Max Gate home and the countryside used for Hardy’s Wessex writings; Cambridge—colleges of Wordsworth, Byron, Tennyson, and others.
Since the students will have read and discussed Dickens’ Great Expectations before leaving for England, more time will be devoted to Dickens. The international component of the course in England will include not only a visit to his museum and home in London, but also a walking tour of the many places he used for settings in his novels.