This concentration includes British and Irish writing from the later seventeenth century to the present. It spans the Restoration and Eighteenth Century, the Romantic period, the Victorian period, Modernism, Postmodernism and Contemporary Literature.

Included in the concentration are familiar novelists (from Defoe and Richardson to Austen and the Brontës, from Dickens and George Eliot to Woolf and Forster, from Joyce and Conrad to Angela Carter and Kazuo Ishiguro), poets (from Dryden and Pope to Blake and Wordsworth, from Tennyson and Elizabeth Barrett Browning to T. S. Eliot and W. B. Yeats, from W. H. Auden and Dylan Thomas to Seamus Heaney and Medbh McGuckian), dramatists (from Aphra Behn and William Congreve to Sheridan, Wilde and Shaw, from Beckett and Brian Friel to Harold Pinter and Caryl Churchill), and essayists and prose writers (from Swift and Johnson to Macaulay and Carlyle, from Kipling and Orwell to Richard Hoggart and V. S. Naipaul)—not to mention the many less familiar, but equally interesting and compelling, writers you will encounter in courses in the concentration.

The concentration addresses many significant developments in the history of English literature and culture, including the emergence into prominence of new or newly transformed genres such as the novel, the short story, journalism, biography and autobiography, and literary criticism itself; the rise of women writers, readers, and critics; the emergence of the modern literary system, centered on a commercial print market; and such broader developments as British imperial expansion and decline; the Enlightenment, science, and secularism; the industrial revolution; the rise of the middle class, democratic reforms, and social movements; immigration, national identity, and European integration.

Degree Requirements (Catalog Year 2013-2014)

In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the BA in English, students receiving this concentration must complete 4 courses (12 credits) chosen from the following. Special topics courses may be used to fulfill the requirements for the concentration when so designated by the department.

ENGH 330 Augustan Age: 1660-1745 Credits: 3
ENGH 331 Age of Sensibility: 1745-1800 Credits: 3
ENGH 332 Restoration and 18-Century Drama Credits: 3
ENGH 333 British Novel of the 18th Century Credits: 3
ENGH 334 British Poetry of the Romantic Period Credits: 3
ENGH 335 Prose and Poetry of the Victorian Period Credits: 3
ENGH 336 British Novel of the 19th Century Credits: 3
ENGH 337 British Poetry after 1900 Credits: 3
ENGH 338 British Novel after 1900 Credits: 3
ENGH 339 British and Irish Drama after 1900 Credits: 3

Requirements may be different for earlier catalog years. See the University Catalog archives.