English

This course provides an introduction to monstrosity as an important part of Victorian culture. Students examine versions of the monstrous which emerged in the Victorian period in a broad historical and cultural context. Students are offered a critical introduction to the various ways in which significant theoretical developments have influenced interpretations of the Gothic, and are encouraged to use and challenge important critical terms and ideas within their own analyses.

This course is a study of the characteristics of modernist and post-modernist novels in English literature, as well as the historical and cultural contexts that influenced their development. It provides a critical analysis of a selection of texts published in the British Isles and/or other English-speaking environments during the Modern (1880-1930) and Postmodern (1960-present) periods. Texts covered may vary by term and/or instructor.

This course focuses on those dimensions of 19th-century American literature and culture that stand out as most distinctive to the culture of the new nation. The course explores four major cultural and intellectual arguments and their overlapping concerns. It begins with the dominating and inescapable presence of slavery and its representation across the middle decades of the century; briefly taking in questions about industrial wage-slavery in the republic. It explores the troubling questions raised by Nature and the natural for the writers and painters of the early 19th century, including the Anglo-American representation of the "Indian" and the writing of the American West. Next students consider ideas of the self, self-culture, the American self before, finally, tackling late-century fiction dealing with Americans in a sophisticated and corrupt Europe.

The course focuses on central literary genres in medieval Irish and Welsh literature which are illustrated by the study of primary texts in English translation and secondary literature.