Literature and Modernity

This course spans an historical era of enormous range and significance: from the French Revolution in 1789 to the mid-twentieth century; from Romanticism to Modernism and after. The course will examine some of the most challenging and influential writers and texts from the last two centuries, examining how literature responds to the upheavals of modernity in terms of history and politics, communications and technology, gender and sexuality, and social and economic relations. A central focus will be to examine how these distinctively modern conceptions and theories of literature continue to set the agenda for literary practice in our language.