Course summary

This masters programme offers an encounter with a range of topics in literary study centred on the literary history of England, Scotland and Ireland in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The core seminar courses (one in each of two semesters) survey the development of literary genres in prose and verse in relation to their intellectual, social and political contexts as these changed from the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688 to the end of the Victorian period. These are the centuries which see:

• in the Enlightenment, the invention and elaboration of modern ‘liberal’ ideas of society

• Romantic conceptions of nationality and national history

• the challenge to these ideas presented by industrial society and a global Imperial polity