The literature of Great Britain and Ireland of the past hundred years. The literature of England written during the last seven decades of the nineteenth century. Emphasis on the writings that deal with the growth of religious skepticism, the rise of the middle class, general education, and the increasing dehumanization of the individual in a society caught up in a new wave of scientific discovery and technological progress. Readings from representative figures such as Dickens, George Eliot, Hardy, Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, Ruskin, Carlyle, and Darwin. A survey of American literature from the time of the Pilgrims to the outbreak of the Civil War.
Emphasis is on the relationship between the emerging culture and literature.
A study of American literature from the Civil War to the development of the United States as a major industrial and military-political power after World War I. Focus is on the American writer's response to his or her own culture and to that of the broadening world. A study of American literature from 1920 to 1945, with emphasis on the writer's interpretation of the complexities of 20th-century life. Concentrates on the responses of contemporary writers to the idiosyncratic problems and themes of the post-World War II era, such as the nuclear age, computer technology, television, the Vietnam experience, racial questions, the debasement of the language, and environmental issues. A study of Elizabethan and Jacobean ideas and attitudes through the investigation of a representative sample of Shakespeare's tragedies, histories, and comedies as well as a few plays by contemporaries of Shakespeare. After completing initial problem-solving exercises in prose, poetry, and drama, students embark upon an approved project of their own design.