English

This course introduce students to the study of American literature at university level. Students gain a knowledge of some of the most emblematic texts and movements in American literary culture as well as some of the historical contexts that have framed them. Through studying a diverse and varied array of works, students gain an insight into the most productive approaches, concepts, and methods for reading US culture. These include thinking about settler colonialism, indigeneity, questions of race, the tension between popular and canonical forms of writing, the effects of literary nationalism, capitalism and its effects, and the problems of narrative representation when faced with the troubling history of America. Central concepts include slavery, democracy, freedom, individualism, personal identity, and geography. 

This course covers three eighteenth-century texts that respectively occupy a significant place in the history of the English novel. The course begins by examining Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders (1722), in which the eponymous heroine purports to give a “true” account of her extraordinary life as an orphan, servant, wife, thief, felon, and penitent. It then moves on to Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling (1771), which recounts the sentimental hero Harley’s encounters with the less fortunate in a harsh and uncaring world. The course concludes with Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), a sensational text that is generally regarded as the first Gothic novel. In addition to studying the rise of the English novel and its various subgenres, the course examines the literary works within their cultural and socio-political contexts and thereby considers some of the important issues that dominated eighteenth-century English culture: self and identity, class, gender, eighteenth-century London, sentimentalism, morality, tradition, reason, the function of literature, and so on.

This course is a chronological survey, examining writers and key representations of Ireland within their contemporary contexts and assessing the chief socio-political motivations and implications underpinning these national portraits. It focuses on two concepts: Irish literature is an active interpreter and interrogator of socio-political realities and, in turn, an active mobilizer of cultural ideals. Second, writers appropriate, modify, or reject previous literary conventions and images to accommodate their own engagement with social change. While the course focuses on themes relevant to the socio-political angle, such as nationalism, cultural identity, history, place, tradition and modernity, representations of women, and “eloquence and violence,” students are reminded that it is the writers' gifts of imagination and insight which make the issues memorable in the first instance.

This course explores the range of Shakespeare's writing of comedy from the early romantic comedies, through the "mature" and "problem" comedies, to the tragicomic romances of the last plays. The course considers early modern and recent ideas about comedy as a genre and mode, and trace the ongoing engagement of the plays with various interpenetrating thematic debates. An early interest in illusion leads to a focus on the shifting and unstable nature of perception, linked on the one hand to the effects of love and desire, and on the other to notions of the theatrical. These interests lead to a comic and comedic exploration of the nature and growth of the self, the problems of desire and of gendered identity, and the ways in which these may be addressed through the artifice of the comic form.