Dubbed the annus mirabilis of literature, 1922 saw the publication of ground-breaking works such as James Joyce’s Ulysses, Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room, T.S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land, Katherine Mansfield’s collection The Garden Party and Other Stories, and the first English translation of Marcel Proust’s A la Recherche du Temps Perdu. These works offer a unique access to the cultural atmosphere of the years leading up to their publication: the shock and trauma inflicted by the Great War, the gradual displacement of nineteenth-century morals and values, the popularisation of psychoanalytic theory, and the emerging changes in the relationships between the sexes. Moreover, these novels, short-stories, and poems paradigmatically indicate a modernist search for new literary forms and embody a radical break with the realist tradition. Through a close reading of the texts, we will investigate the narrative and poetic qualities of the individual works, and at the same time explore the zeitgeist they incorporate.
Please get your own copy of Woolf’s Jacob’s Room (Penguin Modern Classics). Further texts will be made available on Moodle at the beginning of the semester.
NOTE: Students taking this course and intending to do a MAP 4 in English Literatures should have already completed the lecture series course entitled "Survey of English Literatures" (BA English Module 4: English Literature).