ENGL 292 - Topics in British Literature

Credits: 3 Prerequisite: Completion of the FW requirement. British literature, supported by attention to historical and cultural contexts. Versions of this course may survey several periods or concentrate on a group of works from a short span of time or focus on a cultural phenomenon. Students develop their analytical writing skills through both short papers and a final multisource research paper. May be repeated for degree credit and for the major if the topics are different.

Spring 2021, ENGL 292-02: Topics in British Literature: J.R.R. Tolkien on Page & Screen (3). J.R.R. Tolkien has been praised as the “Author of the Century” (the Twentieth Century) on the basis of the remarkable artistic, cultural, and financial success of The Lord of the Rings–along with ancillary texts such as The Hobbit and The Silmarillion. Peter Jackson’s ground-breaking, turn-of-the-millennium film adaptation greatly enhanced and extended such claims into the Twenty-First. This course focuses upon both the original and the films in the context of wide-ranging literary historical questions such as Tolkien’s renewal of medieval romance, his contributions to the development of the modern fantasy novel, definitions and redefinitions of epic, debates regarding the problematic status of escapism and spectacle, and major film theories. (HL) Adams.

Fall 2020, ENGL 292A-01: Topics in British Literature: Literature of the British Slave Trade, 1688-2016 (3). Prerequisite: Completion of the FDR FW writing requirement. The British slave trade lasted from the mid-1600s until 1807, but its legacy is more tenacious: more than 200 years after the abolition of the slave trade, novelists like Yaa Gyasi are still writing about the horrors of this violent institution. To study British literature, however, is often to encounter the slave trade as a shadow or a gap, something that lurks in the background of our favorite 18th- and 19th-century novels but never quite breaks through the surface. By placing novels like Mansfield Park (1814) and Jane Eyre (1847) alongside works that deal more explicitly with slavery, this course aims to disrupt that image of cozy, “civilized” England and demonstrate that British literature cannot be separated out from the Atlantic slave trade and British imperialism. (HL) Walle.

Fall 2020, ENGL 292B-01: Topics in British Literature: Satan and the Romantics (3). Prerequisite: Completion of the FDR FW writing requirement. An introductory survey of major British poets and novelists from the mid-17th to the mid-19th century with particular attention to how the radical poetics of the post-French Revolution Romantic Era was rooted in a fascination with John Milton’s rebellious anti-hero, Satan. Swift, Pope, Fielding, Blake, Wordsworth, Austen, Byron, Percy Bysshe, and Mary Shelley, all canonical figures, are likely to be covered, but the course also attends to the challenges to this tradition by long unacknowledged women writers such as Aphra Behn, Charlotte Smith, and Felicia Hemans. (HL) Adams. FDR: HL