English 316: Twentieth-Century British Literature, Early

“Marriage had not saved her from the sense of flux. London was but a foretaste of this nomadic civilization which is altering human nature so profoundly, and throws upon personal relations a stress greater than they have ever borne before. Under cosmopolitanism, if it comes, we shall receive no help from the earth. Trees and meadows and mountains will only be a spectacle, and the binding force that they once exercised on character must be entrusted to Love alone. May Love be equal to the task!”

E.M. Forster, Howards End (1910)

This course is a survey of important writers in England and Ireland who have had significant impact on the shape of twentieth-century literature in the English-speaking world. The purpose of the course is for you to gain exposure to these writers, if you have never read them before, and to develop your understanding of them, if you have. With this in mind, I have tried to achieve a balance between coverage and depth, allowing enough time with each work to discuss it in depth and to allow interpretations to take shape.

Throughout the the semester we will consider certain struggles, preoccupations, anxieties, and aspirations which connect these literary works to each other and to a certain time and place. During the period of the late nineteenth century through the 1930s, tremendous changes occur which include: the devastation of World War I; struggles for independence against British rule; the so-called “Scramble for Africa” and the reverberations of the Boer War in the British Empire; an influx of immigrants to London, the heart of the Empire; the dramatic and sometimes violent actions of women agitating for suffrage; the arrival of cinema; the advent of psychoanalysis; the Russian Revolution; the rise of Fascism.

The literary works in this course will seem at times to reflect the upheavals of what appears to be a period of intense flux. Many of them are well-known for their stylistic innovations—their experimentation with narrative form and point of view, their fragmentations, ironies, uncertainties, ruptures, and streams of consciousness which change the way readers experience language and the world. We will certainly want to consider modernism’s embeddedness in the world. We need to keep in mind as well that these are texts intensely engaged with the exploration of subjectivity and private life, with internal voices and otherwise forgotten and overlooked details—the scrap of language from a fashion magazine, or the smell of a glove without a partner. Our conversations about these works will be informed by attention to geopolitical aspects such as imperialism and the interaction of British with other cultures. We will also investigate the local, the way the ordinary captures these writers’ imaginations, and how they aspire to revolutionize perception.

Written work focuses on formal essays of critical analysis and interpretation, giving students the chance to study particular texts closely, but also includes exploratory assignments such as stylistic imitations of different writers. Guided oral presentations will allow students to investigate topics not covered in the written assignments, such as the history of empire, film versions of the British past, the effects of technology, the relationships between modernism and feminism, and the intersections of fiction and drama.