History of British and Irish literature 1 1.N3.EP.32

Course objectives:
On completing the HBIL1 course, students will be:
1) familiar with the successive stages in the history of British and Irish
literature
2) familiar with major British and Irish authors and works within the
successive epochs
3) able to analyze and interpret literary texts – poetic, dramatic and
prosaic
4) able to formulate critical opinions and to justify them
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Course content
1) The Old English or Anglo-Saxon Period (410-1066). Historical outline and general literary features.
OE poetry: theme, mood, formal aspects. Secular poetry: “Beowulf” (epic), “Widsith” (quasi-historical), “The Wanderer” and “The Seafarer” (elegiac), “The Battle of Maldon” (war poetry), riddles and charms. Religious poetry: Caedmon’s Hymn, Cynewulf’s religious pieces, The Genesis Poem.
OE prose: The Venerable Bede, King Alfred.
Homework:
Read “The Wanderer” and “The Dream of the Rood” – think about the poems’ structure, theme, imagery, and be ready to interpret them.

2) Classroom discussion: “The Wanderer” and “The Dream of the Rood”.
The Middle English Period (1066-1485). Historical outline and general literary features: new subject matter, different mood, evolution of form, new genres; the evolution of English.
Poetry: rhyming chronicles/chronicles in verse (“Brut”), historical-patriotic poem (“Bruce”), allegorical poetry – didactic and moralizing, usually with an implied religious meaning (“The Owl and the Nightin-gale”, “Pearl”, “Piers Plowman”), lyric (“Cuckoo Song”, “Alison”, “I Sing of a Maiden”), metrical romances (thematic cycles), ballad (e.g. Robin Hood), satirical verses (Chaucer), and pastoral poetry (Alexander Barclay).
Homework:
Read Geoffrey Chaucer’s General Prologue to “The Canterbury Tales”, select 2 or 3 pilgrims for a detailed discussion; what was heroic couplet?

3) Geoffrey Chaucer as the greatest writer of the ME Period.
Classroom discussion: General Prologue to “The Canterbury Tales”.
The rise of drama: miracles, mysteries, and moralities
ME prose: Geoffrey of Monmouth, Sir John Mandeville, and Sir Thomas Malory.
Homework:
Read Shakespeare’s sonnets nos. 18, 130, 144 and 146.

4) The Renaissance (1485-1603). The historical and cultural context. Humanism and the Reformation.
Poetry: epic allegory (“The Faerie Queene”), pastoral (“The Shepherd’s Calendar”), mythological-erotic (“Venus and Adonis”, “Hero and Leander”), the sonnet (types and representatives, Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard Earl of Surrey, Sir Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser).
Classroom discussion: Shakespeare’s sonnets.
Homework:
Read Shakespeare’s tragedy “Macbeth”.

5) Drama: the rise of tragedy (native sources and foreign [Seneca]; “Gorboduc”; Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Kyd) and comedy (native sources and foreign [Plautus and Terence, and Menander]; “Ralph Rois-ter Doister”; John Lyly), the dramatic output of William Shakespeare – his canon comprising 37 plays di-vided into comedies, histories [historical dramas], and tragedies.
Classroom discussion: “Macbeth”.
Homework:
Read about the development of prose style in the 16th century and fragments of John Lyly’s “Euphues” (use the Norton anthology, vol. 1 or the Oxford anthology, also vol. 1). Find out about Euphuistic ornaments – exempla, sententiae, similia, and syntactic devices – isocolon, parison, paromoion.

6) Renaissance prose: Sir Thomas More (“Utopia”) and Thomas Nashe (“The Unfortunate Traveller”).
Classroom discussion: John Lyly’s “Euphues” and Euphuistic style.
The 17th century: from the accession of the Stuarts to the Civil War (1603-1660).
Baroque (Metaphysical poets) and the first omens of Neoclassicism (Cavalier poets).
Homework:
Read John Donne’s “The Flea”, “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning”, sonnet no. 14 from the collection of “Holy Sonnets”, “Hymn to God, My God, in My Sickness”, plus Ben Jonson’s “Queen and Huntress” and “Song: To Celia”, as well as John Milton’s “L’Allegro”.

7) Classroom discussion: the selection of poems by John Donne and Ben Jonson.
Drama: Ben Jonson’s masques, comedies of humours, and classical tragedies.
The literary output of John Milton – poetic, dramatic and prosaic.
Homework:
Read William Congreve’s “The Way of the World” (telling names of the protagonists; theme: love intrigues and money grabbing; the figures of male rake and emancipated female; witty dialogues), and John Dryden’s “Alexander’s Feast”.

8) The Restoration and the first stage of Neoclassicism (1660-1700). Spiritual, intellectual and social con-text.
John Dryden as an occasional poet (“Alexander’s Feast”), satirist, and religious convert.
Samuel Butler’s “Hudibras” and satire of the burlesque kind.
Restoration drama: comedy of manners and its practitioners.
Classroom discussion: “The Way of the World”.
Homework:
Read Alexander Pope’s “The Rape of the Lock”.

9) Restoration prose: John Bunyan’s “The Pilgrim’s Progress” as a religious allegory and hypothetically the first English novel.
The Age of Alexander Pope (1700-1744) as the culmination of Neoclassicism. His “Essay on Criticism” and neoclassical literary theory.
Classroom discussion: “The Rape of the Lock” as a masterpiece of mock-heroic satire.
Homework:
Read Daniel Defoe’s “Robinson Crusoe”.

10) Drama in the Age of Pope: classical tragedy, domestic tragedy, sentimental comedy, burlesque and ballad-opera.
Popular magazines for middle-class readers (Joseph Addison and Sir Richard Steele) and the rise of the novel.
Jonathan Swift and his morbid satire on mankind in “Gulliver’s Travels”.
Classroom discussion: Robinson Crusoe as the prototype of the middle-class practical and enterprising Englishman living in the Age of Enlightenment whose success in life was supported by Protestant religion.
Homework:
Read a selection of songs by Robert Burns (“Corn Rigs an’ Barley Rigs”, “Green Grow the Rashes”, “A Red, Red Rose”, “Scots, Whae Hae”, “Auld Lang Syne”), as well as William Blake’s “The Divine Image” vs “The Human Abstract”.

11) The Age of Transition from Neoclassicism to Romanticism, or the decline of Neoclassicism and pre-Romanticism (1744-1798).
Samuel Johnson as the last prominent writer of the old generation.
Pre-Romantic poets: James Thomson (nature poetry), Thomas Gray and Edward Young (Graveyard school), James Macpherson (antiquarian movement), and Robert Burns (folk poet from Scotland).
Classroom discussion: the songs of Robert Burns. William Blake’s ‘contraries’.
Homework:
Read Henry Fielding’s “Joseph Andrews”.

12) Drama in the Age of Transition: Oliver Goldsmith and Richard Brinsley Sheridan.
The novel: the “Big Four” (Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Tobias Smollett, and Laurence Sterne) and the Gothic romance (Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Gregory Lewis).
Classroom discussion: “Joseph Andrews” and the Quixotic variety of the picaresque novel.
Homework:
Prepare for the end-of-term test.

13) End-of-term test
14 and 15) Individual consultations and retake tests
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Methods of instruction/ forms of classroom activity:
presentation, discussion, reading of literary texts, analysis and interpretation of selected literary texts, written work (test and/or composition), student's self-study at home, ICT tools/e-learning/MSTeams option if needed