Literary History Graduate Seminars

Literary History graduate seminars range widely across periods, genres, and approaches to literary and cultural studies. Here is a sampling of course offerings in the literary history program.

ENG 5630: Critical Theory I. Dr. Edmond Chang

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ENG 7270: Twentieth-Century Literature: Modernism. Dr. Carey Snyder

This course examines British women’s writing from the first three decades of the twentieth century in light of debates surrounding marriage, maternity, and sexuality. Like the new woman writers of the late nineteenth century, Edwardian and interwar women writers challenged the near-compulsory nature of matrimony and motherhood in their fiction, and explored previously taboo sexual topics. Our diverse readings include suffrage drama, feminist poetry, middlebrow fiction, and high modernism. Students become acquainted with the historical contexts that shaped this literature (including the militant suffrage movement, the birth control movement, and World War I) and with recent trends in feminist modernist studies.

ENG 7230: Romanticism. Dr. Nicole Reynolds

At just over 200 years old, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein has proven to be one of the most enduring and influential of all English-language novels. In this seminar we approach Frankenstein through the books that shaped it, focusing especially on those that deeply influenced Mary Shelley’s thought and craft: books written by her mother, proto-feminist author Mary Wollstonecraft; her father, radical political philosopher William Godwin; and her husband, visionary poet Percy Shelley. We also examine books read by Shelley’s nameless creature in the course of his intellectual development: Plutarch’s Lives, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther, and Volney’s Ruins of Empire. At the end of the semester, we consider a selection of contemporary novels that have engaged with Frankenstein in diverse and compelling ways in order to assess the lasting literary and cultural impact of Shelley’s novel.

ENG 7300: American Literature 1776-1865. Dr. Paul Jones

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ENG 7340: American Literature: Modernism/Postmodernism. Dr. Marilyn Atlas

American writers after the Genteel Tradition were confronting questions not only concerning form, but also concerning gender, geography, memory, race, class, and identity. This course investigates how American writers were and are exploring America and American art, creating and recreating sections of it—in pieces—and they, in their unique ways, were telling their version(s) of the transnational and global American story whether through rural, suburban, and/or urban spaces. We look at original reviews, the latest criticism, and most importantly, these complex American texts themselves as we explore the theory that the core of modern/postmodern art is indeed "break-up" (Katherine Kuh) and that twentieth-and twenty-first-century American literature is amazingly experimental, global, hybrid, diverse—and relevant.

ENG 7800: Special Studies Seminar. Dr. Ghirmai Negash

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