Intermediate Courses: British Literature

Pilgrims, Sinners, and Yahoos: Major British Authors A study of the works of three of the greatest British writers, this course begins with an examination of the extraordinary variety and rich humanity of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, then turns to a consideration of the grandeur and complexity of John Milton’s vision in Paradise Lost and other poems, and finally moves on to an encounter with the fierce indignation and satiric genius of Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal and Gulliver’s Travels.

Shakespeare A study of eight to 10 of the major plays that illustrate the variety of Shakespeare’s achievement in different dramatic modes—history, comedy, tragedy, and romance—and his imaginative development as a poet and playwright in the context of the Elizabethan age.

Sacred and Profane: The Literature of Seventeenth-Century England The 17th century, a period in which rampant licentiousness and immorality existed cheek by jowl with uncommon spirituality, is perhaps best epitomized by the complex career of John Donne. Donne made his mark as the master of the seduction poem, became a poet who celebrated married love, then a poet who wrote brilliantly of the dark night of the soul, and ultimately became dean of St. Paul’s and one of England’s greatest Anglican ministers. This course focuses on works that reveal the troubled soul of the age, from the frivolous, sometimes nihilistic, verse of the cavaliers and the dark and tortured dramas of John Webster and Ben Jonson to the calm spiritual intensity of George Herbert and John Milton.

Modern British Fiction This course examines the major writers of 20th-century English fiction, emphasizing the ways in which they have responded to the forces of history and conceptions of human life that characterize the modern era. Loss of belief, altered views of time, and new notions of the nature of human consciousness all brought about changes in writers’ attitudes and techniques. The class reads selected works by such authors as Joyce, Conrad, Lawrence, Forster, Ford, Woolf, Lowry, Cary, and Lessing.