British Literature from the Nineteenth Century to the Present

Instructor: Adam McCune

Syllabus

• Overview
• Schedule

Readings

Romantic Era

• Robert Keene, “How Firm a Foundation” (1787) (score)
• William Blake, Songs of Innocence: “The Chimney Sweeper” (1789)
• William Blake, Songs of Experience: “The Chimney Sweeper” (1794)
• William Blake, Songs of Innocence: “The Lamb” (1789)
• William Blake, Songs of Experience: “The Tyger” (1794)
• William Blake, “And did those feet in ancient time” (1808) (as part of Milton)
• William Wordsworth, excerpts from Lyrical Ballads (1798):
  • “Advertisement”
  • “We Are Seven”
  • “Expostulation and Reply”
  • “The Tables Turned”
• William Wordsworth, “The World is Too Much With Us” (1807)
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Kubla Khan” (1798/1816)
• Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey (1817)
• Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Ozymandias” (1818)
• John Keats, “La Belle Dame sans Merci” (1819/1820/1848)
• John Keats, “Ode to a Nightingale” (1819)
• John Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (1820)
• Lord Byron, “To Ianthe” (1814)
• Lord Byron, “She Walks in Beauty” (1815)
• Lord Byron, “The Destruction of Sennacherib” (1815)
• Lord Byron, “Darkness” (1816)
• Lord Byron, excerpt from Don Juan, canto I (1819)
• Reginald Heber, “Holy, Holy, Holy! Lord God Almighty!” (1826) (score)

Victorian Era

• Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol (1843) (manuscript)
• Elizabeth Barrett Browning, “The Cry of the Children” (1844)
• Elizabeth Barrett Browning, “To George Sand: A Desire” (1844)
• Elizabeth Barrett Browning, “To George Sand: A Recognition” (1844)
• Elizabeth Barrett Browning, selections from Sonnets from the Portuguese (1845-7):
  • sonnet 21: “Say over again, and yet once over again”
  • sonnet 22: “When our two souls stand up erect and strong”
  • sonnet 43: “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.”
• Robert Browning, “My Last Duchess” (1842)
• Robert Browning, “An Epistle Containing the Strange Medical Experience of Karshish, the Arab Physician” (1855)
• Robert Browning, “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came” (1855)
• Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “The Lady of Shalott” (revised 1842)
• Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “Ulysses” (1833/1842) (compare Dante)
• Alfred, Lord Tennyson, from In Memoriam A.H.H. (1850)
  • section 54. “[Oh, yet we trust that somehow good]”
  • section 55. “[The wish, that of the living whole]”
  • section 56. “[‘So careful of the type?’ but no.]”
  • section 124. “[That which we dare invoke to bless]”
• Christina Rossetti, “Goblin Market” (1862)
• Samuel J. Stone, “The Church’s One Foundation” (1866) (score, parallels)
• Matthew Arnold, “Dover Beach” (1867)
• Gerard Manley Hopkins, “God’s Grandeur” (1877/1918)
• Gerard Manley Hopkins, “[Not, I’ll not, carrion comfort]” (1918)
• Gerard Manley Hopkins, “Spring and Fall: To a Young Child” (1880/1918)
• Lewis Carroll, “Jabberwocky” (1871)
• Cecil Frances Alexander, “I Bind unto Myself Today” (1889) (score)
• Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Adventure of the Speckled Band” (1892)
• Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Final Problem” (1893)
• Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest (1895)
• A.E. Housman, “Loveliest of Trees” (1896)
• A.E. Housman, “Diffugere Nives” (1897)

Twentieth Century

• Eleanor Hull, “Be Thou My Vision” (1912) (score)
• Wilfred Owen, “Dulce et Decorum Est” (1920)
• James Joyce, “Araby” (1914)
• William Butler Yeats, “The Second Coming” (1920)
• William Butler Yeats, “Sailing to Byzantium” (1927)
• Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (chs. 1-3 only) (1929)
• T.S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1915/1917)
• T.S. Eliot, “Journey of The Magi” (1927)
• T.S. Eliot, “Macavity: the Mystery Cat” (1939) (explanatory notes)
• P.G. Wodehouse, “Jeeves in the Springtime” (1921)
• George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language” (1946)
• Chinua Achebe, “Dead Men’s Path” (1953)
• W.H. Auden, “Musée des Beaux Arts” (1939/1940)
• Dylan Thomas, “Fern Hill” (1946)
• Stuart Hine, “How Great Thou Art” (1949) (score)
• Stevie Smith, “Not Waving but Drowning” (1957)
• Seamus Heaney, “Digging” (1966)
• Philip Larkin, “Annus Mirabilis” (1967)
• Tom Stoppard, Arcadia (1993) (not online; copyrighted by living author)