Department of British Literature

The Department of British Literature offers courses on British literature from the Anglo-Saxon period up to the 21^st century conducted from different methodological and ideological perspectives, including textual versus cultural studies, as well as current semiotic, sociological, historical, philosophical, postcolonial, feminist, psychoanalytical, anthropological, memory and trauma theories.

Within the scope of Anglo-Saxon and Medieval literature, our research focuses on generic conventions underlying lyrical, dramatic, narrative, and epic modes of writing, with specific emphasis on the formal transgressions between oral and written cultures, the ideological  implications of the uses of the carnivalesque and the constructions of the “Other”, the heroic versus the social-critical modes of literary representation, the ‘returns’ to the medieval past in contemporary literature. Our research on Renaissance literature is oriented towards reception theories and translation practices as regards drama, poetry and the epic, within the theoretical perspectives of rhetoric, genre, ideology. Our research on 18^th and 19^th century literature revolves round issues of pastoral versus urban landscapes, literary and socio-political appropriations of satire, constructions of the female voice and female characters, and the uses of ekphrasis. We also offer courses within the field of Victorian studies on the conventions of realism, the uses/abuses of melodrama, and the historical versus contemporary meanings underlying literary exploitations of crime. Our research on 20^th and 21^st century literature (prose, drama, poetry) revolves round contemporary theories of narratology and genre, interdisciplinary and comparative studies, and film adaptations. We offer courses on post-realist, modernist, and postmodernist literature, feminist and postcolonial writing, popular genres (fantasy and science fiction), literary versus documentary modes, as well as contemporary theoretical approaches to literature.