Anglo-Saxon Literature

Terms and topics

Readings

Anglo-Saxon period, alliterative verse, kenning, heroic tradition, Christian and pagan influence

The Dream of the Rood

Middle English Literature

Readings

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

G. Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales (The General Prologue – presentation of the Knight, the Squire, the Prioress, the Wife of Bath, the Pardoner)

Terms and topics

Middle English period, Arthurian literature, Alliterative Revival, courtly love, chivalry, allegory, frame narrative, estate satire, high genres – dream allegory, romance, low genres – fabliaux; Gawain stanza (bob and wheel), heroic couplets

Elizabethan Drama

Readings

William Shakespeare: Hamlet, Midsummer Night’s Dream

Terms and topics

Medieval heritage (miracles and morality plays), Renaissance, Reformation, Humanism, Elizabethan period, Elizabethan theatre, tragedy, tragedy of character, revenge tragedy, comedy, play within the play, low plot, comic relief, pastoral tradition, blank verse

17th century poetry

Readings

John Milton: Paradise Lost (Book I: Invocation lines1-32)

John Donne: The Flea

Terms and topics

Puritans, Restoration, Metaphysical poetry, conceit, imagery, dissociation of sensibility, heroic epic, secondary epic, invocation, epic conventions, epic hero, in medias res, epic simile

Romantic Age

Readings

William Wordsworth: From the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, Daffodils

Percy Bysshe Shelley: Ode to the West Wind

Terms and topics

First and Second Generation of Romantic Poets, "emotion recollected in tranquility", Romantic attitudes to poetic language, nature and folk tradition; Romantic imagery, the sublime, an ode, Byronic hero

The Development of English Novel. The Victorian Era and Modernism

Readings

Charles Dickens: Great Expectations

Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness

T.S. Eliot The Love Song of J. A. Prufrock

Terms and topics

The development of the English novel before the Victorian Age (epistolary novel, first person accounts, comic epic in prose, the novel of manners), realism, utilitarianism, Gothic tradition, Bildungsroman; Modernism, stream of consciousness; objective correlative, thematic areas and narrative strategies in Victorian and Modernist novels

The novel in the 20th century

Readings

Ian McEwan: Atonement

Terms and topics

Metafiction, post-modernism, pastiche, development of narrative strategies, war literature, social and political criticism