HL1003: Survey of English Literature II
This survey provides an introductory overview of influential literary works from the
Romantics to the present. Lectures will present historical and cultural contexts, such as
the French Revolution and World War I; while close readings of our primary texts will
show us how these contexts helped to shape the formal and aesthetic developments of
each time period. In offering the study of a number of canonical and non-canonical texts,
we will stress specifically the revolution in poetry achieved by the Romantics, the rise of
the novel as a new genre, the experimental nature of nineteenth and twentieth-century
literature, the impact of modernism and postmodernism, and the ways these
developments have defined our understanding of literature and culture.
Core Texts
The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Volume 2.
Hard Times by Charles Dickens (Oxford University Press)
At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O’Brien (Penguin)
Course Assessment
Essay (1500 - 2000 words) / Class attendance, participation and presentation: 50%
Final exam: 50%
Lecturer
Richard Barlow
Office Room No.
HSS-03-77
DID
E-mail Address
rbarlow@ntu.edu.sg
Lecture Schedule
Topics
week
1
Jan.
Introduction to the Romantic Period
2
Jan.
Early Romanticism
3
Jan.
Late Romanticism
Readings
Blake, Songs of Innocence and of
Experience; Burke excerpt; Paine
excerpt; Wollstonecraft,
Introduction to A Vindication of
the Rights of Woman
Burns, ‘To a Louse’, ‘For a’ that
and a’ that’, ‘Robert Bruce’s March
to Bannockburn’;
Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical
Ballads, ‘Tintern Abbey’;
Byron, Don Juan, Shelley, ‘Hymn
to Intellectual Beauty’, ‘Mont
Blanc’, ‘Ozymandias’; Keats,
‘Chapman’s Homer’, ‘Ode to a
Nightingale’, ‘Ode on a Grecian
Urn’
Topics
week
4
Feb.
Readings
Evolution, Industry, Race, and Empire
Darwin, from The Descent of Man;
Engels, from The Great Towns;
Macaulay, from ‘Minute on Indian
Education’; Anonymous,
‘Proclamation of an Irish
Republic’; Arnold, from ‘On the
Study of Celtic Literature’
The 19th Cenury Novel
Dickens, Hard Times
7
The 19th Century Novel
Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr.
Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde
7
RECESS Mar – Mar
5
Feb.
6
Feb.
8
March
The Background of Modernism
Pater, ‘Conclusion’; Frazer,
‘Scapegoats’; Nietzsche, from ‘The
Gay Science’, ‘Upon the Blessed
Isles’ and ‘Attempt at a Critique of
Christianity’; Freud, ‘Female
Sexuality’
Owen, ‘Anthem for Doomed
Youth’, ‘Dulce Et Decorum Est’;
Yeats, ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’,
‘Easter, 1916’, ‘The Second
Coming’; An Imagist Cluster:
Hulme, Pound, H.D., Blast, Loy
Woolf, ‘Modern Fiction’;
Joyce, ‘The Sisters’; ‘Penelope’,
9
March
World War I and Early Modernism
10
March
Modernist prose
11
April
Modernist poetry
Eliot, ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred
Prufrock’ ; poems by William
Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound.
12
April
Postcolonialism
Orwell, ‘Shooting an Elephant’,
‘Politics…’; Walcott, All; Ngũgĩ wa
Thiong'o, ‘Decolonising the Mind’
13
April
Postmodernism
O’Brien, At Swim-Two Birds;
Beckett, ‘Ping’