Edgar Allen Poe and James Fenimore Cooper may also be considered. A critical analysis of literary trends from the Civil War to the post-World War I era. The works of Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, and Jack London show the influence of Naturalism on the Realistic Movement. The trends of twentieth-century American poetry, especially such seminal figures as Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Wallace Stevens. A study of the movements and patterns in American intellectual and cultural history that have influenced the American literary scene.
Emphasis is placed on contemporary authors and writings.
Students are encouraged to study theories of cultural influence as well as to formulate their own theories. Experiments in both style and language abound in the twentieth-century British novel, as novelists both expand the language and explore new realms within the conscious worlds they inhabit. The course traces these experiments through the works of such artists as James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett, Joyce Cary, Elizabeth Bowen, George Orwell, Lawrence Durrell, Malcolm Lowry, Evelyn Waugh, William Golding, Muriel Spark, Margaret Drabble and Iris Murdoch. Both historical and practical in its concerns, this course reviews the large critical trends important to both English and American literature and provides graduate students with the opportunity for work in practical criticism of individual literary works. Among those poets studied are W. B. Yeats, D. H. Lawrence, Robert Graves, Wilfrid Owen, W. H. Auden, John Betjeman, Dylan Thomas, Philip Larkin, Ted Hughes, and Seamus Heaney.