Modernism, Nature, Ecology

Centered on British and American modernist and “proto-modernist” poetry and fiction from roughly the 1880s to the early 1940s, this course will consider writers such as Virginia Woolf, W.B. Yeats, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, H.D., Emily Dickinson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Matthew Arnold, and Rainer Maria Rilke to consider how they imagined and portrayed “nature” within a post-industrial world. As we read we will be querying and theorizing how these writers rendered the ecologies of landscapes, waterscapes, and cityscapes.