Modern Literature

This course will explore the question of what it meant to write the “modern” in British and American poetry and fiction from late Victorianism and the fin-de-siècle through the Second World War. By refining our skills in close and careful reading we will query especially shifting understandings and representations of culture, aesthetics, art, poetics, value, ethics, and meaning. We will be encountering literature by a range of writers such as Emily Dickinson, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Matthew Arnold, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Robert Frost, Thomas Hardy, Wilfred Owen, Rupert Brooke, Siegfried Sassoon, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, W.B. Yeats, W.H. Auden, Virginia Woolf, and T.S. Eliot. We will also look briefly at contemporary modernist visual artists including Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, and Wassily Kandinsky.