Course Description

This exciting English Literature course will investigate the ways British life has been represented by novelists, poets and playwrights from the early part of the Twentieth Century. Beginning with Thomas Hardy, who ended the Nineteenth Century as a controversial novelist but began the Twentieth as a key poet, the course will attempt to show how significant factors like World War One, the Jazz Age and the Depression which immediately followed, The Second World War and the emergence of rock and roll and the Working Class rebel in the 1950s were treated by writers as diverse as TS Eliot, Evelyn Waugh, Wilfred Owen, Patrick Hamilton, Noel Cowerd, John Osborne and Alan Silitoe.

As well as looking at key literary works from the early part of the Century, students will also be given a taste of the culture of the times, including film, popular and classical music, photography and art. They will get a clear historical perspective of the factors that affected Britain as it moved from an Empire to a Commonwealth and how such issues as feminism, the class system, the North South divide and the atomic age plus two World Wars shaped the British psyche and altered the way the British began to think (and write) about themselves.

Students interested in literature, history, politics and the media will find this course especially interesting and challenging. The course will involve students taking part in debates and presentations and will encourage a holistic approach to the study of writing. Students who are talented writers themselves will also find that the course provides them with stimulation for their own creative writing.

Students who attended this year's course on Victorian writing will find this an interesting follow up.

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