Modern Literature

Modern Literature, from the 1880s to the early 1960s

Together in this course will explore the question of what it meant to write the “modern” in British and American poetry and fiction during a time of major, transformative changes in culture, aesthetics, psychology, philosophy, and technology from roughly the 1880s through the early 1960s. By refining our skills in careful, close textual analysis we will engage deeply with literature by writers such as Emily Dickinson, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Matthew Arnold, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Thomas Hardy, Wilfred Owen, Rupert Brooke, Siegfried Sassoon, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, W.B. Yeats, Virginia Woolf, Bob Dylan, Gwendolyn Brooks, Samuel Beckett, and T.S. Eliot. We will also consider modernist visual artists including Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, and Wassily Kandinsky.