English Literature: Literature and Society: Enlightenment, Romantic and Victorian (Taught)

This masters programme offers an encounter with a range of topics in literary study centred on the literary history of England, Scotland and Ireland in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The two core seminar courses, one per semester, survey the development of literary genres in prose and verse in relation to their intellectual, social and political contexts as these changed from the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688 to the end of the Victorian period. These are the centuries which see:

• the Enlightenment, the invention and elaboration of modern ‘liberal’ ideas of society

• Romantic conceptions of nationality and national history

• the challenge to these ideas presented by industrial society and a global Imperial polity

The core courses of this programme will examine the ways in which novels and poems mediated and resisted these and other developments.

Alongside the core courses, each semester students will take an additional seminar course chosen from a range of options.

In both semesters, a research methods course helps prepare students for their masters dissertation, written on a topic of their own choosing between April and August.