Handbook

The Literature of the Modern is a study of British prose and poetry from the industrial revolution of the early nineteenth century to the Second World War in the twentieth. This was a period in which the modern world took shape through an unprecedented series of technological, social and political changes, many of which first occurred in Britain. While progress came to be widely celebrated, many authors were also concerned that their contemporary world had become severed from its traditions and cultural heritage. A core element of this course will be to consider how literature of the period responded to the idea of being modern and to the cultural, social and political ramifications of modernity. The question was repeatedly asked – how should we understand progress? Authors examined include William Wordsworth, Charlotte Smith, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, Thomas De Quincey, W.B Yeats, T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf.