Historia literatury brytyjskiej 1

Course aims:

to provide students with a historical framework of British literature from the early Middle Ages to the present; to introduce students to major literary trends, authors and texts in British literature; to encourage students' personal interpretation of the text and improve their ability to recognise its historical context, rules of the genre and literary convention; to introduce students to the main developments in English versification; to acquaint students with the basic concepts and terms in modern approaches to texts; to encourage student interaction with text;to create opportunities for practising and developing advanced reading skills; to help students develop an active and well-informed attitude and response towards language, text and culture.

TOPIC AREAS

1. From Old English to the Restoration period

OE heroic epic in verse; OE society: values and beliefs; epic convention: primary and OE versification: alliteration and kennings; Early Middle English (ME) conventions: allegory and romance; the Arthurian Cycle, Alliterative Revival; Medieval drama: origins and differences: Miracle, Mystery, Morality Plays and Interludes; Medieval literature: Geoffrey Chaucer and his contribution to the development of English versification; Renaissance (I): changes in philosophy and aesthetics, Tudor and Elizabethan drama (Interludes, University Wits), development of comedy and tragedy; Renaissance (II): William Shakespeare the dramatist, and his tragic hero; Renaissance (III): The English sonnet vs Petrarchan sonnet, the sonneteers: Thomas Wyatt,

Philip Sidney, Edmund Spencer, William Shakespeare; Renaissance (IV): prose of the Elizabethan period;

Metaphysical poetry vs Cavalier poetry; Puritans' approach to literature: John Milton; Restoration period: satire and comedy of manners.

2. From the rise of the novel to the Late Victorian period

Novel as discourse: socio-cultural shaping factors and literary antecedents; Typology of the 18th century novel; aspects of the structure (Laurence Sterne); Development of the novel at the turn of the 18th century: sentimental, Gothic, historical; Jane Austen and the modern psychological novel; Romanticism (1): William Blake and the Lake Poets (William Wordsworth, Samuel T. Coleridge); Romanticism (2): the second generation of Romantic poets (John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, George Gordon Byron); Victorian novel (1): periodisation (Early and Late Victorian Period); Charlotte and Emily Bronte; the Romantic vs the Victorian; Victorian novel (2): Utilitarian philosophy; Victorian values; the Great Tradition of the 19th century novel (Charles Dickens) Victorian poetry: themes - death, relationship to God, the passage of time; Alfred Tennyson and Robert Browning; Late Victorian Period: breakdown of Victorian standards; "Gay Nineties" and the Aesthetic Movement (Oscar Wilde); Pessimism, determinism and emotional despair (Thomas Hardy); new concepts in poetry (Gerard Manley Hopkins).

3. British literature of the 20th century

Poetry of World War I: "War poets" Wilfred Owen and Isaak Rosenberg; new attitude to war ("the horror of war"); Modernism in the novel (1): reaction against representational (mimetic) function of literature; Joseph Conrad ? the narrative voice and the focal character; Modernism in the novel (2): stream of consiousness and interior monologue (James Joyce), experimental psychological novel (Virginia Woolf); Modernism in poetry: Imagism, Symbolism ? the later poetry of William Butler Yeats; The novel of ideas: utopia and anti-utopia from the turn of the 19th century to the 1950s (H.G.Wells, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell); Drama of the 1950s and the 1960s: the 'Angry Young Men' movement (John Osborne); the theatre of the absurd and the comedy of menace (Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter); Postmodernist novel (the 1960s onwards) (John Fowles, Martin Amis, Ian McEwan); Postmodernist drama: postmodern topics and tactics in the British drama- language games (Tom Stoppard); poetry in the postmodern world: concrete poetry, 'Martian school'; exploration of the

nation's past, individuality and culture in "bog poetry" (Seamus Heaney).