British Literature

Course Overview

This survey course is designed to give students a taste of the incredibly vast and complex wealth of literature that hails from the British Isles. It is literally impossible to cover all important, canonical works of British Literature within the course of a year, so the focus of this class is to expose students to a few notable works from early periods; specifically, we will study the Anglo-Saxon, Medieval, and Renaissance eras. These periods span across many centuries, so students can expect to learn some basics of British history as well as history of the English language. The focus of our inquiry is the evolution of the English Epic, from the earliest example of the Anglo-Saxon Beowulf to the late-Renaissance masterpiece Paradise Lost. This exploration of the epic allows us to consider important cultural and historical moments as illustrated in the literature and how those moments influenced Western (and thus, American) thought and cultural consciousness.