• • Home
  • Undergraduate Study
• • Postgrad English
  • Postgrad Creative Writing
• • Research
  • Staff
• • News & Events
  • Contact Us
• • Resources for Current Students

Undergraduate Menu

Search using keywords/tags or full text search.

ENGL 303: Decadence to Modernism, 1890-1945

Course Aims and Objectives:
This course aims to examine some of the key writers from a turbulent epoch of artistic experiment and innovation. We will begin with the decadence of the 1890s and then will move on to look in close textual detail at many of the boldest new kinds of poetry and fiction that emerge in the early twentieth century as the new language of modernism. We will also seek to understand the wider social and cultural contexts, including imperialism, nationalist struggles, socialist revolution, feminism and mass-culture, in which these works powerfully intervene.

Assessment:
1 x 3,000-word essay (40%) plus 1 unassessed exercise; 1 x 3 hour final examination (60%).

Submission Deadline:
Essay = by 12 noon on Monday Week 1/Term 2

Contact Hours:
One lecture and one seminar per week

Learning Outcomes:
Students who successfully complete the course will have enhanced their knowledge of early twentieth-century literature and culture, improved their skills in close analysis of literary texts, developed an understanding of the significant affinities and differences between decadent and modernist texts, and enhanced their ability to relate literature to its cultural and critical contexts.

Set Texts:
W.H. Auden, Selected Poems
Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim
Arthur Conan Doyle, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
T.S. Eliot, Collected Poems 1909-1962
James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
D.H. Lawrence, Women in Love
Jean Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight
H.G. Wells, The Time Machine
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway
Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
W.B. Yeats, Selected Poems

For further reading, see the course Moodle site.

Lecturers: AES = Dr Tony Sharpe; AWT = Dr Andrew Tate; BB = Dr Brian Baker; LCM = Dr Lindsey Moore; MJG = Dr Michael Greaney; PF = Professor Paul Farley; SJS =Professor John Schad; TP = Mr Tony Pinkney.

Lecture / Seminar Programme

Term 1

Term 2

Term 3

Back to: ENGL 301

Forward to ENGL 304

Courses Index