The Renaissance
The Golden Age of the English drama:

The University Wits and their contribution to the Elizabethan School of Drama;
 William Shakespeare’s literary heritage.
Romeo and Juliet – the most famous love tragedy. Motifs of revenge, jealousy and ambition in Hamlet , Othello and Macbeth .
John Donne’s metaphysical poetry:
 secular and religious themes;
 paradox, imagery and symbolism;
 physical and spiritual love (“A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning”, “The Flea”).
The Puritan Age
John Milton, an outstanding poet of the Puritan period.
 The reflection of Milton’s affliction in
Paradise Lost and “On His Blindness”.
Milton’s understanding of Christian sense of duty;

Themes, main problems and symbols of Paradise Lost .
The Origins of the Novel
Authors as “editors” of “true histories”:

Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe – a fictional account of survival;
 Samuel Richardson’s epistolary novels:
Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded and Clarissa
Harlowe .
William Blake’s poetry:

Spiritual and moral problems of Songs of Innocence and Experience ;

The values and limitations of two different perspectives on the world in Songs of
Innocence and Experience ;.
 Symbolism and allegory in the poems “The Sick Rose”, “The Lamb”, “The Tiger”.
Romanticism
Early English Romanticism. The Lake Poets.
 Key motifs of William Wordsworth’s poetry: the importance of feeling and instinct, the beneficial influence of nature, the splendour of childhood;
 Coleridge as a “poet of imagination”. Symbols in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”.
The second generation of Romantic poets.

The notion of Byronic hero;
 John Keats’ view on the relationship between art and life.
Realism
Charles Dickens as a prominent writer of the Victorian era .

An individual and society in Oliver Twist ;

The moral and spiritual transformation of Scrooge in “A Christmas Carol”.

Aestheticism
The philosophy of aestheticism; “Art for art’s sake”. Oscar Wilde.

The values of aestheticism in A Picture of Dorian Grey ;
 Oscar Wilde’s unusual fairy tales (“The Happy Prince”, “The Nightingale and the
Rose”): literature for children or adults?
Modernism
T.S. Eliot’s
The Waste Land .
 The poem’s cultural context: spiritual crisis after World War I;

Wasteland as a metaphor;

Types of wasteland: emotional, spiritual, and intellectual;

The motif of inarticulateness.
D.H. Lawrence.

Lawrence as a social rebel and modernist artist;
 Recurrent themes in Lawrence’s fiction;
 Lawrence’s critique of modern Western civilization.