English 10B-1 - Fall, 2017

Literatures in English II: 1700-1900

Class Information

Instructor: Thomas, George
CRN: 41758
Time: MWF 11:00-11:50
Location: 1116 Hart

Description

This is a reading- and writing-intensive course designed to help students prepare for upper-division courses in the English major. Our focus will be on English-language literature from 1700-1900 in both Britain and the United States. We will read poetry, short stories, novels, drama, and even a little literary theory. We will cover Romanticism, Realism, Naturalism, the Victorian Era, and the entanglements of the era’s literature with empire, race, gender, sexuality, and a rapidly modernizing world. Also: shipwrecks, monsters, piracy, adventure, political radicalism, love, and wit. The goal of the course is to help you become a dynamite close reader with a good working knowledge of Anglophone literature during this period.

Grading

Participation, Group Presentations, Reading Papers, Two essays, and a Final Exam.

Texts

Robinson Crusoe (Penguin), Daniel Defoe
Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
Benito Cereno, Herman Melville
Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman
The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde
And selections from Swift, Blake, Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Wollstonecraft, Tennyson, Dickinson, Apess, Jacobs, Poe, and Crane, among others.