QUESTION BANK: BRITISH LITERATURE

MEDIEVAL ENGLISH LITERATURE

Book of Margery Kempe

Thomas Malory, Le Morte d’Arthur

Everyman and Medieval Miracle Plays, ed. A. C. Cawley

Middle English Lyrics, ed. Maxwell S. Luria and Richard Hoffman

Oxford Anthology of Medieval English Literature, 2^nd ed., ed. J. B. Trapp, Douglas Gray, and Julia Boffey

Old and Middle English Poetry, ed. Wu and Treharne

Secondary: Derek Pearsall, Old and Middle English Poetry (1977)

Richard Beadle. Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre (1994)

Roberta Krueger. Cambridge Companion to Medieval Romance (2000)

Carol Meade, ed. Women and Literature in Britain, 1150-1500 (1993)

Michael Alexander. A History of Old English Literature (2002)

Dieter Mehl. English Literature in the Age of Chaucer (2001)

Monica Brzezinski Potkay and Regula Meyer Evitt, ed. Minding the Body: Women and Literature in the Middle Ages, 800-1500 (1997)

David Wallace, ed. Cambridge History of Middle English Literature (1999)

Fred C. Robinson. The Tomb of Beowulf and Other Essays (1994)

T. A. Shippey and Andreas Haarder. Beowulf: The Critical Heritage (1990)

Peter S. Baker, ed. Beowulf: Basic Readings (1995)

J. A. Burrow. Medieval Writers and their Work: Middle English Literature and its Background, 1100-1500 (1991)

R. D. Fulk, ed. Interpretations of Beowulf (1991)

______. A History of Old English Literature (2003)

Discuss Christian and pagan elements in Beowulf and at least one other Old English poem.
Assume you have been asked to decide on the selection for an anthology meant to illustrate the varieties of Old and Middle English literature (excluding Chaucer). Assume further that Beowulf and SGGK are already in the selections. State what other pieces you would include and why.
Demonstrate your understanding of at least two levels of interpretation of medieval allegory. You may wish to consider such works as The Dream of the Rood, The Pearl, Piers Plowman, and/or one of the morality plays.
Discuss how medieval cycle plays “rewrite” Biblical texts to reflect contemporary concerns and issues. Make reference to at least three plays.
How do medieval lyrics weave Christian and courtly elements?
Discuss the late-medieval frame narrative? How does the frame unsettle our interpretation of the inset narratives?
Compare and contrast the ways women are written by literature and the ways they write literature in medieval England.
State the defining elements of the medieval romance form and then explain how at least three of the following either exemplify or diverge from the form:

§ King Horn

§ Havelock

§ Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

§ Any tale from Malory’s Morte

§ Bevis of Hampton

§ Athelston

§ Sir Orfeo

CHAUCER

ELIZABETHAN-JACOBEAN DRAMA

Suggested Readings:

C.L. Barber, Creating Elizabethan Tragedy: The Theater of Marlowe and Kyd (Chicago, 1988)

Catharine Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy (New York, 1985)

Fredson T. Bowers, Elizabethan Revenge Tragedy (Princeton, 1940)

M.C. Bradbrook, Growth and Structure of Elizabethan Comedy (Berkeley, 1956)

A.R. Braunmuller and Michael Hattaway, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Drama (Cambridge, 1990)

John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan, eds., A New History of Early English Drama (New York, 1977)

Jonathan Dollimore, Radical Tragedy (Chicago, 1984)

Brian Gibbons, Jacobean City Comedy, 2^nd ed. (London, 1980)

Jean Howard, The Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern England (London, 1994)

David Scott Kastan and Peter Stallybrass, eds., Staging the Renaissance (New York, 1991)

Alexander Leggatt, Citizen Comedy in the Age of Shakespeare (Toronto, 1973)

Robert Watson, Ben Jonson’s Parodic Strategy (Cambridge, MA, 1987)

1. Discuss the class aspirations of ordinary citizens and the prospects for social advancement in three city comedies. How do the plays punish or accommodate Elizabethan and Jacobean class mobility?

2. Discuss the relationship between the plot and the subplot in two of the following plays: A Woman Killed With Kindness, Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, The Shoemaker’s Holiday, The Changeling. What themes do the plot and subplot have in common, and how does their treatment differ? For instance, does the subplot clarify or question any of the attitudes, beliefs or choices found in the main plot?

3. The 1563 “Homily of the State of Matrimony” points out that a wife “must be spared and borne with, the rather for that she is the weaker vessel, of a frail heart, inconstant [could mean emotionally or sexually], and with a word soon stirred to wrath. And therefore, considering these her frailties, she is to be the rather spared.” Choose 2 women (from 2 different plays, at least one of which is a comedy) and describe whether they support or challenge this conventional portrait of a woman, and whether the play “spares” each or subjects her to correction.

4. The typical protagonists in the drama of Marlowe and Chapman have been described as “over-reachers,” figures whose ambitions carry them beyond traditional cultural limitations and who, as a result, pay a dear price. Considering one play by each playwright, discuss how the over-reacher’s ambitions reflect the culture of Elizabethan England (its political and social institutions, its prevailing ideas, or the practices of its people). Be sure your answer includes a discussion of each author’s attitude toward his character.

5. City comedy often treats marriage in primarily economic terms. Discuss the function of marriage in regulating class structure and the pursuit and retention of wealth in one comedy by two of the following three authors: Jonson, Dekker, Middleton.

6. Beyond presenting “the fall of a great man,” tragedy can reflect ideological conflicts in a culture at large—differing ideas about power, gender, sexuality, belief, education, and the role of particular social institutions. Choose two of the following tragedies and discuss the situations faced by the protagonists as reflections of larger currents in Elizabethan and Jacobean culture. What do the resolutions suggest about the possibility of resolving those conflicts? (Edward II, Dr. Faustus, The Spanish Tragedy, The Revenge of Bussy D’ambois, A Woman Killed with Kindness, The Malcontent, The Maid’s Tragedy, The Duchess of Malfi)

7. Choose at least one romantic comedy and one satiric comedy and use them as the basis of an essay comparing the two genres. What specific elements determine each genre? (You may wish to consider some or all of the following: themes, characterization, structure, language and intention.) Pay particular attention to the ways each genre borrows, comments on, or transforms elements from the other.

8. Many Elizabethan and Jacobean dramas can be described as meta-theatrical. In their frames, internal action or incorporated elements they describe theories and practical uses of theater, or they point to a theatrical strain in early modern English culture. Choose two of the following and discuss how each reflects on the purposes and possibilities of theater: Dr. Faustus, The Spanish Tragedy, Volpone, The Malcontent, The Knight of the Burning Pestle, Bartholomew Fair, The Roaring Girl.

9. If, as critics have argued, there is little outright evil in Jonsonian comedy, what explains the proliferation of gulls, fools, lechers, social climbers and the like? Choose three comedies and discuss the link of folly to economic, social, educational, linguistic, gender, theological, or political issues in the plays.

10. Jacobean plays have often been said to be more sensationalistic than their Elizabethan counterparts: the comedies sexier and less moralistic, the tragedies bloodier and more cynical. Choose either two comedies or two tragedies—at least one Elizabethan and one Jacobean—and use them as the basis of an essay that demonstrates this claim and explains the plays’ thematic functions in relation to their historical circumstances. Alternatively, you may write an essay that disputes the claim using the same number of plays and the same type of thematic and historical argument.

11. According to the Bible, revenge belongs to God (“Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord”). According to early modern English law, revenge belonged to the state, and was prohibited to the individual. Yet Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists and theatergoers were drawn to plays in which characters take vengeance into their own hands. Choose at least two revenge tragedies and use them as the basis of an essay that accounts for the phenomenon: do the period’s revenge tragedies challenge the Biblical and legal prohibitions, revealing problems with religious or political ideologies; or do they ultimately endorse the prohibitions, condemning personal revenge? Or is there another explanation?

THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY

Suggested T. J. Bindoff, Tudor England

Readings: E. M. W. Tillyard, The Elizabethan Old World Picture

C. S. Lewis, English Literature in the 16th Century

Douglas Bush, The Renaissance and English Humanism

Hallett Smith, Elizabethan Poetry

J. W. Lever, The Elizabethan Love Sonnett

Douglas L. Peterson, The English Lyric from Wyatt to Donne

Neil Rudenstine, Sidney's Poetic Development

C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love

G. Hough, A Preface to the Faerie Queene

1. Examine sixteenth‑century ideas about critical theory. What is the nature and function of literature according to Sidney in "An Apology for Poetry," Jonson in "Timber: or Discoveries," and one of the following: Thomas Wilson in "The Art of Rhetorique," George Puttenham in "The Art of English Poesy," or Samuel Daniel in "A Defense of Rime"?

2. How are opposing views of the Reformation in England reflected in the sermons of John Colet and Hugh Latimer? Or in other important Renaissance voices?

3. How was Erasmus's Praise of Folly an attack upon the medieval system of education? How do his ideas compare with those of Thomas Elyot in The Book of the Governor, or those of Roger Ascham in The Schoolmaster?

4. The Renaissance was a great age of discovery and adventure. How did works like Hakluyt's The Principal Navigations and Ralegh's "Report of the Truth of the Fight...betwixt the Revenge...and an Armada of the King of Spain" reflect the patriotic enthusiasm of the time?

5. Compare the Old Arcadia with the New Arcadia. What were Sidney's intentions in each work, and how do the two selections reflect the Renaissance interest in romance and the heroic?

6. Spenser fills The Faerie Queene with inverse progressions from antitype to type. Choosing either the House of Pride and the House of Holiness from Book I, or the Bower of Bliss and the Garden of Adonis from Books II and III, discuss both the technique and the substantive themes Spenser advances in either case.

7. One of the most pervasive themes of Elizabethan literature is the Fall of Princes. Examine two selections from the Mirror for Magistrates, including Sackville's "Induction," and explain the concept of political tragedy therein.

8. According to Hallett Smith, the Ovidian tradition "evolved in the sixteenth century in an emancipated glorification of the sense and the imagination." Three examples of this tradition are Shakespeare's "Venus and Adonis" and "The Rape of Lucrece" and Marlowe's "Hero and Leander." Apply to them the substance of Smith's observations.

9. Discuss the conventional forms, subjects, and themes of the sonnet and trace their evolution from Wyatt and Surrey to Sidney, Spenser, and Shakespeare. Discuss one or more Elizabethan sonnet sequences.

10. On the basis of More's Utopia and at least one other critical or educational treatise of the sixteenth century, discuss the growth and character of English humanism.

11. Of what importance are Petrarchan conventions to the works of two or three poets of the English Renaissance?

12. The Books of The Faerie Queene are artfully constructed in accordance with a variety of patterns, not the least of which is numerology. Choose two Cantos from any Book or Books of The Faerie Queene and discuss the ways Spenser matches the substance of those Cantos to their numbers.

SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY POETRY AND PROSE

Suggested Douglas Bush, English Literature in the Earlier Seventeenth Century

Readings: Stanley Fish, Self-Consuming Artifacts

Joan Bennet, Five Metaphysical Poets

Louis Martz, The Poetry of Meditation

Richard Strier, Love Unknown

Warren L. Charnaik, The Poet's Time

J. B. Leishman, The Art of Marvell's Poetry

Charles Coffin, John Donne and the New Philosophy

Joseph Summers, George Herbert; His Religion and His Art

1. What is meant by the term "the new science" ("new philosophy")? Examine its relevance to works of at least two of the following: Donne, Bacon, Burton, Browne, Pepys.

2. Donne, a witty poet, draws upon Petrarchism, new science, neoplatonism, and scholasticism for ideas and literary conventions. Discuss some of these ideas and conventions with reference to and analysis of three of Donne's poems. Examples might include "Air and Angels," "The Good Morrow," "The Ecstasie," "The Canonization," "Song ("Go and catch...")," "The First Anniversary: An Anatomy of the World," "Elegy 19 ("To His Mistress Going to Bed")." (You may refer to other works instead of or in addition to these suggested titles.)

3. The end of innocence and the search for its recovery in the mind is a pervasive theme in Andrew Marvell's work. Examine this theme in three or four of Marvell's poems.

4. Discuss the ways in which George Herbert constructs his poems as symbolic form or "hieroglyphs." Refer to four or more poems, including at least two of the following: "The Altar," "Easter Wings," "Church Monuments," "Aaron," "Denial," "The Bunch of Grapes."

5. Discuss differences between the "cavalier" and "metaphysical" styles of seventeenth-century poetry. Refer to works of at least three of the following poets: Donne, Jonson, Herbert, Herrick, Lovelace, Crashaw, Marvell, Vaughan.

6. Discuss the literary reactions to historical and political events in any two of Andrew Marvell's poems. Examine each poem in detail.

7. Examine the "metaphysical wit of John Donne's devotional prose or poetry. Note some of the defining characteristics of that wit and give examples from at least two of the following works: The Holy Sonnets (you may refer to several sonnets but only as one example), Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, "Death's Duell" (or any other sermon), "Good Friday Riding Westward, 1613," "Upon an Annunciation and Passion falling upon the same day, 1603."

8. Many seventeenth-century poets draw heavily upon classical themes as well as genres, such as epigram, satire, epithalamium, elegy, and ode. Explore this classical influence on any two poets. Discuss at least four poems in detail and consider the following questions: what are some classical models for the genre? What are some conventions of the genre, and how does the poet handle them?

9. Justification by faith alone and denial of personal merit, a tenet of Calvinism, is central to George Herbert's poetry. Explain this doctrine and examine its relevance to at least three of Herbert's poems, such as "The Altar," "The Collar," and "Love III." You may discuss other poems instead of or in addition to these poems.

10. Explore the stylistic range of Andrew Marvell's poetry by discussing in detail one poem from three of the following categories: Metaphysical, pastoral, epideictic (poetry of praise), satiric.

11. Discuss the varieties of English prose styles in the seventeenth century. Refer to works of at least three of the following writers: Bacon, Browne, Bunyon, Burton, Donne, Evelyn, Herbert, Pepys, and Walton.

12. Many devotional works of the seventeenth century show the influence of formal mediation and, in particular, the spiritual exercise of St. Ignatius Loyola and the Jesuit order. Discuss the relevance of formal mediation to two of the following works of John Donne: the Anniversaries (An Anatomy of the World and Of the Progress of the Soul), Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, and Holy Sonnets.

13. Discuss: Should John Donne's Anniversary poems An Anatomy of the World and Of the Progress of the Soul be read separately, or together--as companion poems? Support your answer with specific references to both poems and the events that occasioned Donne's writing of them.

14. George Herbert described the poems of The Temple as "a picture of the many spiritual conflicts that past betwixt God and my soul." In an examination of four poems, discuss how Herbert successfully transforms conflict into art. In each case, discuss the spiritual conflict and justify your selection of the poem with specific details of language or form.

15. Discuss particular examples of any three of the following seventeenth-century genres. In each case, consider the defining elements of the genre and comment on the literary merit of your selection: Sermon, Essay, Character, Diary, Biography, Autobiography, Emblem Book.

MILTON

Suggested Donald L. Clark, John Milton at St. Paul's School

Readings: John G. Demaray, Milton and the Masque Tradition

Christopher Hill, Milton and the English Revolution

Merritt Y. Hughes, Complete Poems and Major Poems

Michael Lieb and John T. Shawcross, Achievements of the Left Hand

Marjorie H. Nicolson, A Reader's Guide to John Milton

Joseph Summers, The Muse's Method

Joan Webber, Milton and his Epic Tradition

1. How are Milton's developing ideas of his vocation to be a poet formulated in his works? Lycidas and the Invocations of Paradise Lost should be touchstones for your discussion.

2. By discussing Paradise Lost and one minor poem, explain how John Milton linked himself to the classical tradition of poetry.

3. Develop a thesis and then argue its merits concerning this topic: women, tempting and tempted, in the masque known as Comus and Paradise Lost.

4. Discuss Milton's concept of human liberty, referring to at least three of his works in poetry and/or prose.

5. How does the narrator in Paradise Lost reflect Milton's ideas of the role of the poet?

6. Discuss structural and thematic differences and similarities in L'Allegro and Il Penseroso.

7. Discuss the relationships among Free Will, Providence, and Predestination in Milton's argument justifying the "ways of God" in Paradise Lost. Begin with a definition Free Will, Providence, and Predestination.

8. What conclusions do you have concerning Milton's idea of the poetic vocation based on his references to poets and the muse? Incorporate Milton's experimentation with different poetic genres in your discussion of this topic.

9. Discuss Milton's notions of "Time" using one major and one minor work to substantiate your thesis statement and arguments.

10. With reference to one minor and one major work, examine Milton's construction of his Muse.

11. Attack or defend Milton from the charge of misogyny using the epic character of Eve as your major focus but including two other female characters in your analysis.

12. Discuss Milton as a representative of the Renaissance using Paradise Lost and two other works to establish your point of view. Define "Renaissance" carefully before you proceed to argue.

13. In one major work, how does John Milton develop the notion of kingship? How does this reflect ideas of kingship developed during the medieval or early modern period?

14. Choose one of the following images: “light” or “hands” or “flight,” and discuss Milton's use of that image in Paradise Lost.

RESTORATION AND EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY DRAMA

Suggested Richard Bevis, English Drama: Restoration and Eighteenth Century, 1669-1787

Readings: Laura Brown, English Dramatic Form, 1660-1770: An Essay in Generic History

J. Douglas Canfield and Deborah C. Payne, editors, Cultural Readings of

Restoration and Eighteenth Century Theatre

Bonamy Dobree, Restoration Comedy, 1660-1720

, Restoration Tragedy, 1660-1720

Norman Holland, The First Modern Comedies: the Significance of Etherege,

Wycherley, and Congreve

Robert Hume, The Rakish Stage: Studies in English Drama, 1660-1800

John Loftis, Comedy and Society from Congreve to Fielding

Robert Markley, Two-Edg'd Weapons: Style and Ideology in the Comedies of

Etherege, Wycherley & Congreve

David Nokes, John Gay, A Profession of Friendship: A Critical Biography

Aubrey L. Williams, An Approach to Congreve

James Anderson Winn, John Dryden and His World

1. Discuss the influence of business and entrepreneurial activity on the works of at least three of the following eighteenth‑century playwrights: Sir Richard Steele, John Gay, George Lillo, Richard Cumberland, David Garrick, George Colman, Oliver Goldsmith, and Richard Brinsley Sheridan. Was it inevitable that the rise of the commercial spirit should correspond to the rise of sentimentality? Explain.

2. Restoration comedies have been condemned as immoral, obscene, trivial, and dull. Defend the validity of these charges or defend the plays against them with developed analysis of three plays from the following list: Wycherley's The Country Wife, Etherege's Marriage a la Mode, Vanbrugh's The Relapse, and Congreve's Love for Love or The Way of the World.

3. Discuss the role of women in at least one play by each of the following playwrights: William Wycherly, George Etherege, and Aphra Behn. Do each of these writers present women in similar ways? Does Aphra Behn treat women differently from the other two? Explain carefully, and please avoid sweeping generalizations. Base your discussion on specific explications of the plays you chose.

4. In "An Essay on the Theater; or, a Comparison between Laughing and Sentimental Comedy," Oliver Goldsmith writes that sentimental "comedies have had of late great success, perhaps from their novelty, and also from their flattering every man in his favorite foible. In these plays almost all the characters are good, and exceedingly generous; they are lavish enough of their tin money on the stage: and though they want [i.e., lack] humor, have abundance of sentiment and feeling. If they happen to have faults or foibles, the spectator is taught not only to pardon but to applaud them, in consideration of the goodness of their hearts; so that folly, instead of being ridiculed, is commended, and the comedy aims at touching our passions without the power of being truly pathetic." Discuss the development of anti‑sentimental comedies by Goldsmith and Sheridan.

5. At the end of John Gay's Beggar's Opera, the Beggar says: "Through the whole piece you may observe such a similitude of manners in high and low life, that it is difficult to determine whether (in the fashionable vices) the fine gentlemen imitate the gentlemen of the road, or the gentlemen of the road the fine gentlemen. Had the play remained as I at first intended, it would have carried a most excellent moral. 'Twould have shown that the lower sort of people have their vices in a degree as well as the rich: and that they are punished for them." Discuss the play in terms of the quotation. Explain how the satire works.

6. Many writers after 1660 responded through their literature to the grim view of life set forth by Thomas Hobbes in The Leviathan (1651). Select two playwrights from the following list and explain how they responded to Hobbes in at least one of their plays: John Dryden, William Wycherely, George Etherege, Aphra Behn, and William Congreve.

7. In what essential ways does Mirabel, the protagonist of Congreve's The Way of the World, differ from the typical Restoration rake? Compare and contrast him with two rakes from two other plays.

8. Compare and contrast the following protagonists from Restoration and early eighteenth‑century drama: Horner, Dorimant, Willmore Loveless, Valentine, Mirabell, Belville junior. Discuss the evolution of the drama in terms of their differences.

9. Compare and contrast a play by Sheridan or Goldsmith with a play by Wycherely or Etherege.

10. The Rehearsal, a play by the Duke of Buckingham written chiefly to lampoon the dramatic work of John Dryden, initiated a new genre usually called rehearsal plays. Select two plays, each by a different eighteenth‑century author, that fall into this category for discussion. Explain in your essay, in as much detail as you can, how the form changed and evolved.

PROSE AND POETRY FROM 1660 THROUGH 1800

Suggested Walter Jackson Bate, From Classic to Romantic: Premises of Taste in Eighteenth-

Readings: Century England

John Butt, The Augustan Age

Louis Bredvold, The Literature of the Restoration and the Eighteenth Century

Claude Rawson, Satire and Sentiment, 1650-1830

Maximillian Novak, Eighteenth-Century English Literature

George Sherburn, The Restoration and Eighteenth Century

James Sanbrook, The Eighteenth Century: The Intellectual and the Cultural

Context of English Literature, 1700-1789

Ronald Paulson, The Fictions of Satire

Martin Price, To the Palace of Wisdom

Patricia Meyer Spacks, The Poetry of Vision

1. How do you account for the rise in popularity of periodical literature during the eighteenth century? What kind of subjects did periodicals deal with and in what particular contexts? Who made up their audience? Who were their writers? In your answer, please include discussion of at least three of the following journals: The Tatler, The Spectator, The Guardian, The Craftsman, The Covent-Garden Journal, The Gentleman's Magazine, The Rambler, and The Idler.

2. What evidence is there in Gulliver's Travels that Swift takes a more complex view of humanity than Lemuel Gulliver at the end of Part IV? How do you know that the ending represents Gulliver's point of view rather than Swift's? As you consider these two questions, tell how you know that the book should be read as satire. How does the satire reveal itself? How does it work? Against whom is it directed?

3. Poems like Pope's The Rape of the Lock and The Dunciad are often called mock epics, in part because they incorporate the elements of traditional epic poetry in a satirical framework. Discuss either or both of Pope's poems mentioned above as examples of the mock‑heroic genre. Explain why either or both become serious works of art in their own right. Why did Pope not write a serious epic in the vein of, say, Paradise Lost?

4. On the basis of central works by such writers as Dryden, Swift, Pope, and Johnson, discuss the purposes of imitation as opposed to translation of classical forms and works. Explain in terms of particular examples.

5. "Disorders of the intellect...happen much more often than superficial observers will easily believe. Perhaps, if we speak with rigorous exactness, no human mind is in its right state. There is no man whose imagination does not sometimes predominate over his reason, who can regulate his attention wholly by his will, and whose ideas will come and go at his command. No man will be found in whose mind airy notions do not sometimes tyrannize and force him to hope or fear beyond the limits of sober probability. All power of fancy over reason is a degree of insanity. To indulge the power of fiction, and send imagination out upon the wing, is often the sport of those who delight too much in silent speculation. When we are alone we are not always busy. He who has nothing external that can divert him, must find pleasure in his own thoughts, and must conceive himself what he is not; for who is pleased with what he is?... In time some particular train of ideas fixes the attention, all other intellectual gratifications are rejected, the mind, in weariness or leisure, recurs constantly to the favourite conception, and feasts on the luscious falsehood whenever she is offended with the bitterness of truth. By degrees the reign of fancy is confirmed; she grows first imperious, and in time despotick. Then fictions begin to operate as realities, false opinions fasten upon the mind, and life passes in dreams of rapture or of anguish.... This, Sir, is one of the dangers of solitude..." (Johnson, Rasselas, ch. XLIV). In what way are these lines, spoken by Imlac about the Astronomer, representative of Rasselas's own problematic quest for the choice of life? How do they help reveal the source of dramatic irony essential to the tale? How do they prepare us for the final irony of the denouement?

6. Hobbes's argument that man is not naturally a social being but rather a purely selfish creature with a restless desire for power left a deep impression on his contemporaries and subsequent generations. Write an essay on the influence of Hobbes's ideas on writers in the Restoration and early eighteenth‑century period. Be sure to mention specific works by authors such as John Wilmot (2nd Earl of Rochester), John Dryden, Anthony Ashley Cooper (3rd Earl of Shaftesbury), Bernard Mandeville, and Alexander Pope.

7. Who were the Scriblerians? Discuss in depth one work from the following list as representative of Scriblerian satire: Trivia, The Beggar's Opera, Peri Bathous, The Dunciad, Gulliver's Travels. What are its hallmarks? How does its satire work? How are its themes conveyed?

8. "...[R]emember that goodness, not knowledge, is the happiness of man. The day will come, the day will come quickly, when it will profit a man more to have subdued one proud thought than to have numbered the host of heaven." This quotation, from one of Samuel Johnson's sermons, expresses a theme that runs through much of Johnson's work. Discuss this theme with particular and developed reference to at least two of the following: The Vanity of Human Wishes, Rasselas, The Rambler, and The Lives of the Poets.

9. The following lines from Sir John Denham's Cooper's Hill exerted a powerful influence on the poetry of late seventeenth and early eighteenth‑century poets:

O could I flow like thee, and make thy stream

My great example, as it is my theme!

Though deep, yet clear, though gentle, yet not dull,

Strong without rage, without o'er flowing full.

Write an essay in which you first explore the prosody of these lines in some detail and then show the ways that this prosody helps to make the themes of either Pope's Windsor Forest or Essay on Criticism manifest.

10. Of the minor poets of the middle eighteenth century, William Collins and Thomas Gray stand out. Discuss in detail at least one work by each poet in order to show their original and distinguishing characteristics. How do their poems differ from the dominant forms and modes of poets like Dryden and Pope?

11. Dr. Johnson wrote that Sir John Denham in "Cooper's Hill" invented for the English "a species of composition that may be denominated local poetry, of which the fundamental subject is some particular landscape, to be poetically described, with the addition of such embellishments as may be supplied by historical retrospection, or incidental meditation." With this definition in mind, select from the following list two poems to discuss in depth: John Dyer's Grongar Hill or The Ruins of Rome; Thomas Gray's Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College or Elegy Written in a Country Church-Yard; Oliver Goldsmith's The Deserted Village; William Cowper's The Task.

ROMANTICISM

Suggested M. H. Abrams, The English Romantic Poets

Readings: , The Mirror and the Lamp

Northrop Frye, A Study of English Romanticism

, Fearful Symmetry

Karl Krober and Gene Ruoff, eds. , Romantic Poetry: Recent Revisionary

Criticism

Harold Bloom, ed., Romanticism and Consciousness: Essays in Criticism

, The Visionary Company

Tillotama Rajan, Dark Interpreter: The Discourse of Romanticism

René Wellek, A History of Modern Criticism: 1750- 1950, vol.2, The Romantic

Age

Helen Vendler, The Odes of John Keats

Peter L. Thorslev, Freedom vs. Destiny

Marlon Ross, "Romantic Quest and Conquest" in Romanticism and Feminism

(ed. Anne K. Mellor)

1. Keats wrote his six great odes, "Ode on a Grecian Urn," "Ode to a Nightingale," "Ode on Indolence," "Ode to Psyche," "Ode on Melancholy," and "To Autumn," within the space of one calendar year. Choose three of the odes and discuss them, OR discuss a theme or issue that appears in variations in all the odes.

2. For some time Romantic poetry was presented as the simple celebration of nature. This view has undergone considerable revision, beginning with the work of Geoffrey Hartman. Defining his use of the term "apocalyptic" in his book on Wordsworth, he writes: "The term may also describe a mind which actively desires the inauguration of a totally new epoch, whether preceding or following the end of days. And since what stands between us and the end of the (old) world is the world, I sometimes use 'apocalyptic' to characterize any strong desire to cast out nature and to achieve an unmediated contact with the principle of things." Discuss Hartman's thesis in relation to two or three romantic poets.

3. In Wordsworth's "Preface to the Lyrical Ballads" and Shelley's Defence of Poetry we have two remarkable Romantic manifestos. Write an essay in which you compare Wordsworth's and Shelley's notions of Romanticism as they appear in these essays, drawing also on the works of these two poets to support your analysis.

4. Using Wordsworth's Prelude as a model, discuss the genre of the Künstlerroman (biography, or autobiography, of the artist) as it appears and reappears in British Romanticism.

5. One of the pastimes of critics is to trace the influence to be found in the works of the British Romantic poets. Of course, Milton and Shakespeare make the most frequent cameo appearances, but other influences, ranging from Ovid to an author's Romantic contemporaries, litter British Romanticism. Choosing works by at least three authors, discuss the effects of Romantic literary borrowing.

6. In a variety of ways the Romantics revered the experience of childhood, bequeathing to us a sense of the child's privilege and unique insight. Using Wordsworth's descriptions of childhood in The Prelude and examples drawn from the work of two other authors, write an essay in which you discuss the variety in Romantic attitudes toward childhood and/or infancy.

7. Following Spenser's example, the Romantics experimented widely with poetic forms, one of which was, of course, the Spenserian stanza. Choosing examples from the works of at least three authors, discuss the ways these poets employ and/or subvert poetic form in their composition.

8. Peter Thorslev establishes two conflicting desires that drive British Romanticism that he names, in his title, Freedom vs. Destiny. He finds the Romantic poets torn between their desire to believe themselves appointed as artists or prophets by a higher authority, and at the same time to believe themselves entirely autonomous creators of their human visions through the medium of the "divine" Romantic imagination. Choosing one pole or the other, or examining the conflict between them, discuss this issue as it appears in the work of at least two British Romantic poets.

9. There are two opposing pulls in Romantic theory, the impulse to discover richness in the quotidian human experience, and the fascination with the mystical or superhuman experiences of vision or prophesy. Choosing one pole or the other, or examining the conflict between them, discuss this issue as it appears in the work of at least two British Romantic poets.

10. In his own time Byron was arguably the most influential and certainly the most infamous British Romantic figure, yet subsequent criticism has demoted him in importance and often omits his work altogether from considerations of British Romanticism. Discuss Byron's controversial place in the British Romantic canon.

11. Critics argue that the French Revolution was both a formative experience and a primary source of themes and imagery for the British Romantics. Using at least one poet from the first British Romantic generation (Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge) and at least one poet from the second British generation (Byron, Shelley, Keats), discuss the ways these poets represent the French Revolution and how our understanding of this representation shapes our interpretation of their work.

12. Marlon Ross has said, in a larger consideration of the roles of gender in British Romanticism, that Wordsworth represents a recognizable Romantic impulse when he attempts "to bring 'feminine' vulnerability of emotion into the realm of 'masculine' power." Discuss the conflict of the "feminine" and the "masculine," which terms clearly you will have to define, as it appears in the work of three Romantic poets. If you chose, you may instead discuss the work of two British Romantic poets and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.

13. Byron's eponymous legacy the Byronic hero has had an enormous impact on literatures in a variety of traditions. Choosing as an example Manfred, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, or Cain (although you may refer to other works as well), discuss the Byronic hero and the function of that role within the work you discuss. Then, using this definition and discussion, analyze the "heroism" in Books I-IV of Don Juan.

14. Responding to the criticism of Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Coleridge had the following to say about The Rime of the Ancient Mariner:

Mrs. Barbauld once told me that she admired the Ancient Mariner very much, but that there were two faults in it,--it was improbable, and had no moral. As for the probability, I owned that that might admit some question; but as to the want of a moral, I told her that in my own judgment the poem had too much: and that the only, or chief fault, if I might say so, was the obtrusion of the moral sentiment so openly on the reader as a principle or cause of action in a work of such pure imagination. It ought to have had no more moral than the Arabian Nights' tale of the merchant's sitting down to eat dates by the side of a well and throwing the shells aside, and lo! a genie starts up and says he must kill the aforesaid merchant because one of the date shells had, it seems, put out the eye of the genie's son.

Discuss the "moral" of the Ancient Mariner: does it have one? is it clear? does it inform and/or illuminate the "improbable" plot? As a product of your consideration, develop a reading of the poem.

15. Although Blake was in a chronological sense the "first" of the six canonical British Romantic poets, his work was not known to his contemporaries, and his style is, in fundamental ways, unlike those poets with whom he is traditionally grouped. Nevertheless, many of Blake's concerns anticipate the issues that will interest his fellow British Romantic poets, and indeed modern readers have found in Blake's mythology powerfully effective symbols for Romanticism's ambitions, concerns, and liabilities. Drawing on the works of at least two other British Romantic poets, discuss the importance and recurrence of any one of the following Blakean elements: the "orc cycle," innocence vs. experience (remembering Blake's specific definition of these conditions), spectre and emanation, the character Urizen/Nobodaddy, or the character Los.

THE ENGLISH NOVEL TO 1832

Suggested Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding

Readings: Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel

Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction

Jane Spencer, The Rise of the Woman Novelist from Aphra Behn to Jane Austen

Janet Todd, The Sign of Angellica: Women, Writing, and Fiction, 1660-1800

Walter Jackson Bate, Samuel Johnson

Martin C. Battestin, Henry Fielding

John Bender, Imagining the Penitentiary: Fiction and the Architecture of Mind in

Eighteenth-Century England

Terry Castle, Masquerade and Civilization: The Carnivalesque in Eighteenth-

Century Culture and Fiction

J. Paul Hunter, Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-Century

English Fiction

Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel

Alan McKillop, The Early Masters of English Fiction

1. In the Preface to Joseph Andrews, Henry Fielding gives one of the earliest definitions of the novel. He calls it "a comic epic in prose," and then explains that its plot, extended and comprehensive with a large circle of incidents and a great variety of characters, is light and ridiculous. The ridiculous, he says, is the province of the novel, and the only source of the true ridiculous is affectation. "Now, affectation proceeds from one of these two causes, vanity or hypocrisy: for as vanity puts us on affecting false characters, in order to purchase applause; so hypocrisy sets us on an endeavour to avoid censure, by concealing our vices under an appearance of their opposite virtues.... From the discovery of this affectation arises the ridiculous, which always strikes the reader with surprize and pleasure." Discuss a novel by Fielding in terms of this definition. Is this definition helpful in our understanding of novels by other writers of the period? Explain with specific examples.

2. It is generally agreed that the novel as a generic form came into being during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Write an essay about the evolution of the new genre with reference to particular writers and works before 1740, when Richardson's Pamela was published.

3. Discuss the different ways Richardson and Fielding influenced the development of the novel in the eighteenth century.

4. Jane Austen described her work to her brother in the following words: "the little bit (two inches wide) of ivory on which I work with so fine a brush as produces little effect after much labor." Explain whether or not this assessment is fair with reference to and analysis of at least two of Austen's novels.

5. Discuss Jane Austen's satire on the gothic novel in Northanger Abbey. Why does she disapprove of this genre when, in the same book, she writes that in the best of such novels "the greatest powers of the mind are displayed," and that they show "the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humor...in the best chosen language"? In your answer contrast what Austen accomplishes in Northanger Abbey with Ann Radcliffe's Mysteries of Udolpho (the book Austen singles out for ridicule and parody) or with Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto.

6. Compare and contrast the different approaches of Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, and Lawrence Sterne to their novels. Discuss what you perceive to be the consequences and implications of this difference, including mention of narrative techniques and rhetorical strategies. Select at least one novel from each of these writers for analysis.

7. In his Life of Johnson Boswell reports Johnson as saying of Richardson and Fielding that "there was as great a difference between them as between a man who knew how a watch was made, and a man who could tell the hour by looking on a dial‑plate," and that "there is more knowledge of the human heart in one letter of Richardson's, than in all of Tom Jones." What is your reaction to these comments? Defend your point of view through a comparison of a novel by each writer.

8. Discuss a novel by Defoe—e.g. Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, or Roxanna—first as fictional art, second as a social or sociological tract, and third as a religious book. What are the distinct advantages and disadvantages to each approach?

9. In what ways are the following subgenres similar and different from one another: the picaresque novel (e.g. by Defoe and Fielding), the novel of sensibility (e.g. by Smollet and Sterne), the oriental tale (e.g. by Francis Sheridan and Johnson), and the gothic novel (e.g. by Walpole and Beckford). In your essay refer to specific writers and books.

10. Given ordinary expectations for the chronological development of narrative, especially as they are conditioned by novels from Defoe to Fielding, explain what is surprising about Sterne's The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, and give reasons for its difference. In your discussion of this novel by Sterne, say something about his peculiar style and its relationship to the theme. Refer to specific episodes or events in the novel that encapsulate his unusual approach.

VICTORIAN POETRY

Suggested Carol T. Christ, The Finer Optic

Readings: Robert Langbaum, The Poetry of Experience

, The Mysteries of Identity

J. Hillis Miller, The Disappearance of God

A. Dwight Culler, The Poetry of Tennyson

Jerome H. Buckley, Tennyson

Christopher Ricks, Tennyson

Lionel Stevenson, The Pre-Raphaelite Poets

Norman Crowell, A Reader's Guide to Robert Browning

1. Victorian poetry begins to depict an increasing sense of isolation, reflecting what J. Hillis Miller has termed the "disappearance of God." Discuss this notion in relation to Browning, Tennyson, or Arnold.

2. Due to the progress of science, technology, and industry, a new sense of human finitude emerges in Victorian poetry. Without discussing the causes of this phenomenon, consider this notion in regard to two of the following: Browning, Tennyson, Arnold.

3. Tennyson's poetry seems torn between the desire to register a sense of loss that can only be assuaged by a complete immersion into art, and the need to provide a socially responsible moral lesson. Discuss this tension in four poems of Tennyson. Be sure to discuss In Memoriam and "The Palace of Art."

4. Discuss Browning's use of the dramatic monologue in three poems.

5. In his poetry Hardy confronted the doubts that had been imposed upon many Victorians by the work in such disciplines as geology, astronomy, and biblical criticism. Unlike earlier Victorians, however, Hardy found no refuge in a rarefied aestheticism or a sense of social ethics. Discuss Hardy's unique stance towards quintessentially Victorian themes. What is Victorian and what is modern in Hardy? Illustrate your discussion with an examination of three poems.

6. Tennyson's "The Lady of Shalott" can be read as an allegorical meditation on the precarious relationship between art and reality. Provide a detailed examination of this poem that explores this issue.

7. Robert Langbaum writes of Arnold's poetry: "Arnold deals with the peculiarly modern personality that, caught between two or more worlds without feeling at home in any, must be perpetually choosing among cultures and therefore perpetually living in the intellect. Such a person is beset by fatigue...because he can never find repose in impulse or tradition." Respond to Langbaum's thesis by examining three poems by Arnold.

8. The Norton Anthology of English Literature makes a strange confession about Gerard Manley Hopkins: "the first four editions of The Norton Anthology of English Literature (1962‑1979) grouped Hopkins with these same twentieth-century poets [such as Auden, Thomas, and Eliot]. To reclassify him is not to repudiate his earlier reputation as a `modern' but rather to suggest that his work can be better understood and appreciated if it is restored to the Victorian world out of which it developed." Write an essay either defending or refuting this decision. Illustrate your discussion with an examination of three poems.

9. The poetry of Swinburne presents a strange combination of an erudite aestheticism and a brooding obsession with death, sado‑masochism, and homosexuality. Is this actually a strange combination? Can these elements be seen as part of an aesthetic whole? Discuss three poems.

10. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Christina Rossetti, and William Morris could be said to share a consciousness of opposition to the general Victorian culture. Define the terms of this opposition on both a formal and a thematic level in three poems by two of these poets.

VICTORIAN NOVEL

Suggested Walter E. Houghton, The Victorian Frame of Mind, 1830-1870

Readings: George Levine, The Realistic Imagination

J. Hillis Miller, The Form of Victorian Fiction

J. H. Buckley, The Victorian Temper

Raymond Williams, Culture and Society

Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic

Kathleen Tillotson, English Novels of the 1840's

Edgar Johnson, The Life of Charles Dickens

Gordon Haight, George Eliot

Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists From

Brontë to Lessing

1. Discuss the character of the outsider, or the outcast who provides critical perspective, in at least two Victorian novels by different authors.

2. Discuss the role of orphans or illegitimate children in at least three Victorian novels.

3. Compromised and compromising women figure prominently in Victorian fiction. Examples might include Becky Sharp, Gwendolen Harleth, and Eustacia Vye. Discuss the role of the flawed "heroine" in at least three Victorian novels.

4. The fact that Victorian fiction was fascinated with the notion of the multi-plot novel has caused modern critics to view Victorian novels as intrinsically flawed. Such critics would no doubt agree with James's characterization of the Victorian novel as loose, baggy monsters. What can be said in favor of the multi-plot novel? What did it enable the Victorians to achieve? Examine three Victorian novels in your discussion.

5. The Victorian novel is often considered to be a rather dull reflection of a conventional way of life. The Victorian novel, however, is frequently concerned with what has been termed "sensation." Indeed, the "sensational novel" was a sub-genre of Victorian fiction. Discuss two novels by as many writers with regard to the element of sensation in them. To what end is sensation employed? Consider any novel by Wilkie Collins and one other novel that contains elements of sensation, such as Trollope's The Eustace Diamonds, Dickens's Bleak House or Eliot's Romola.

6. The novels of Thomas Hardy stand, almost self-consciously, at the end of the development of the traditional realist novel. They register a sense of pessimism not only about the state of human affairs, but also about the traditional topoi—i.e., marriage, social change, rise in station, etc.—of Victorian fiction. Discuss Hardy's fiction as the terminus of the Victorian novel. Treat at least two novels in depth.

7. The constant concern with marriage in Victorian novels was a way of thinking about and maintaining the transference of property and capital. Discuss this thesis in light of one novel by three of the following writers: Dickens, Eliot, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, or Hardy.

8. The uncovering of secrets seems to drive the plot of many of George Eliot's novels. They are the mechanism by which accounts are rendered and settled—not always willingly—on the part of the individual in relation to society. Discuss this notion in examining Middlemarch and one other novel by Eliot.

9. The novels of Charles Dickens are often said to present a critique of the social injustices of Victorian England. Yet they frequently contain characters who seek above all else to rise in station and be accepted by society. Does this apparent contradiction invalidate the usual perception of Dickens, or does it add a complexity to it? Discuss this issue in relation to two novels by Dickens.

VICTORIAN PROSE

Suggested Walter Houghton, The Victorian Frame of Mind

Readings: George Levine, ed., The Art of Victorian Prose

, The Boundaries of Fiction: Carlyle, Macauley, Newman

René Wellek, "Matthew Arnold," History of Modern Criticism 1750-1959: The

Later Nineteenth Century, vol. 4

A. Dwight Culler, The Victorian Mirror of History

Lionel Trilling, Matthew Arnold

John Holloway, The Victorian Sage

J. H. Buckley, The Victorian Temper

Jonathan Loesberg, Fictions of Consciousness

1. The Victorians clearly reacted against the boundless subjectivism of the Romantics. Discuss how three or four Victorian prose writers elaborated a new concept of self.

2. With the diminishing role of religion in society, culture begins to assume a greater redemptive role in Victorian thought. Discuss the larger social uses of art as outlined in Arnold's Culture and Anarchy.

3. In The Stones of Venice Ruskin employs the notion of Christian medieval art to launch a critique of Victorian society. Medieval art presents an image of art as the expression of its society and of the laborer at one with his labor—in contrast to nineteenth‑century England. Discuss in detail the implicit and explicit critique of Victorian society and art Ruskin attempts in The Stones of Venice.

4. For many Victorians the answer to the problems created by industrialization and the rise of the middle class was to be found in art. Discuss the reasons for this by examining the work of Arnold, Ruskin, or Morris.

5. Many Victorian writers were not only seeking to define art but were also striving to outline the kind of society such an art would be at home in. Critics as diverse as Arnold, Ruskin, Pater, and Morris (as well as such movements as the Pre‑Raphaelite Brotherhood) turned from the fractured society they lived in and sought a vision of an organic society in which art could be a lived affair among its inhabitants. Assess this ambition. Is it laudable? Is it doomed? Is it progressive or reactionary? Focus on the work of one critic.

6. Through an examination of Pater's The Renaissance and Wilde's "The Decay of Lying" and "The Critic as Artist" explore the notion of aestheticism as a literary and critical doctrine. Focus especially on the interrelation between art and criticism. What is the role of the critic? What is the task of criticism?

7. Paul Feyerabend, a great fan of J. S. Mill, writes in Against Method: "The attempt to increase liberty, to lead a full and rewarding life, and the corresponding attempt to discover the secrets of nature and of man entails, therefore, the rejection of all universal standards and of all rigid traditions." Discuss how Mill's On Liberty could lead to such a conclusion.

8. Critics have been intrigued by the bizarre status of Carlyle's texts. They seem to inhabit a strange space between fiction and criticism. In Criticism in the Wilderness Geoffrey Hartman writes: "Criticism differs from fiction by making the experience of reading explicit: by intruding and maintaining the persona of editor, reviewer, reader, foreign reporter, and so forth. Our struggle to identify—or not to—with imaginative experience usually in the form of a story is what is worked through. Both paradigmatically and personally the critic shows how a reader's instincts, sympathies, defenses are now solicited and now compelled. The psychological drama of reading centers on that aroused merging: a possible loss of boundaries, a fear of absorption, the stimulation of a sympathetic faculty that may take over and produce self‑alienation. This is felt to be too threatening even now when a critic fudges the line between commentary and fiction—the merging, which most criticism methodically prevents, but which Carlyle represents." Discuss this strange aspect of Carlyle's prose works—especially Sartor Resartus.

9. Several Victorian critics turned from their usual mode of criticism to write autobiographies. Given their oppositional stance towards their society, it is intriguing to observe them rendering accounts with this same society. Discuss the notion of confession, particularly as it relates to the interaction between individual and society, in either Ruskin's Praeterita, Mill's Autobiography, or Newman's Apologia Pro Vita Sua.

MODERN BRITISH POETRY

Suggested Richard Ellmann, Yeats: The Man and the Masks

Readings: Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era

Samuel Hynes, The Auden Generation

Helen Gardner, The Art of T. S. Eliot

John Fuller, A Reader's Guide to W. H. Auden

Stephen Spender, T. S. Eliot

Cleanth Brooks, Modern Poetry and the Tradition

John Hollander, ed., Modern Poetry: Essays in Criticism

Frank Kermode, The Romantic Image

J. Hillis Miller, Poets of Reality

Michael Rosenthal, Modern Poets: A Critical Introduction

T. S. Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism

1. W. H. Auden described a test for distinguishing a minor from a major poet: "Read early and late poems. If they are the same, the poet is minor; if different, major." Using this touchstone, discuss developments in the career of a major modern British poet such as Yeats, Eliot, or Auden.

2. Outline the development of Yeats's poetic career, distinguishing the characteristic traits of the various phases. Discuss such features as mythology, symbolism, and poetic diction. Illustrate your discussion by the examination of at least five of Yeats's poems.

3. Discuss the presentation of the subject of the alienation of the individual in modern life in two modern British poets.

4. In his lecture at Oxford as Professor of Poetry, W. H. Auden proclaimed: "The subject matter of a poem is composed of recollected occasions of feeling, among which the most important are recollections of encounters with sacred beings or events. This crowd the poet attempts to transform into a community by embodying it in a verbal society. Such a society, like any society in nature, has its own laws; its laws of prosody and syntax are analogous to the laws of physics and chemistry. Every poem must presuppose–sometimes mistakenly—that the history of the language is at an end." Put these notions to the test by examining three poems by Auden.

5. In an interview Auden made the following provocative statement: "The arts can do nothing. The social and political history of Europe would be what it has been if Dante, Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Mozart, et al., had never lived. A poet, qua poet, has only one political duty, namely, in his own writing to set an example of the correct use of his mother tongue which is always being corrupted. When words lose their meaning, force takes over. By all means, let a poet, if he wants to, write what is now called an `engage' poem, so long as he realizes that it is mainly himself who will benefit from it." Auden crystallizes here a perspective implicit in Modernism. At the same time, exactly the opposite perspective is implicit in Modernism—that art has a political and social function. Elaborate an oppositional dialogue between two modern British poets over this issue. Discuss two poems by each.

6. In The Great War and Modern Memory Paul Fussell writes: "One of the cruxes of the war, of course, is the collision between event and the language available‑‑or thought appropriate‑‑to describe them. To put it more accurately, the collision was one between events and the public language used for over a century to describe progress. Logically, there is no reason why the English language could not perfectly well render the actuality of trench warfare: it is rich in terms like blood, terror, agony, madness, shit, cruelty, murder, sell‑out, pain, and hoax, as well as phrases like legs blown off, intestines spilling out over his hands, screaming all night, bleeding to death from the rectum, and the like. Logically, one supposes, there is no reason why a language devised by man should be inadequate to describe any of man's work. The difficulty was in admitting that the war had been made by man and was being continued ad infinitum by them. The problem was less one of 'language' than of gentility and optimism, it was more a problem of 'linguistics' than of rhetoric." Discuss how poets of World War I confronted this challenge of writing of events that had no reference point either in public discourse or in the existing canon of English poetry. Discuss two poems each by two of the following writers: Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Rupert Brooke, Ivor Gurney, Isaac Rosenberg.

7. Discuss the autobiographical aspect in the poetry of W. B. Yeats and W. H. Auden, including the elements of artistic persona, world citizen, and private individual.

8. Citing specific references, discuss the way in which W. B. Yeats employs the recurring images of wind and bird as unifying and yet developing motifs in his poetry.

9. Why is The Waste Land considered the definitive poem of Modernism? Be specific and provide detailed analysis.

10. T. S. Eliot had a great impact on the poetry of the twentieth century not only because of his own poetry but also because of his critical essays. In one of his well known essays, "Tradition and the Individual Talent," Eliot states: "Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things." Discuss Eliot's thesis in relation to three modern British poets. Discuss two poems by each.

11. Discussing Modernism, Irving Howe writes: "Subjectivity becomes the typical condition of the modernist outlook. In its early stages, when it does not trouble to disguise its filial dependence on the romantic poets, modernism declares itself as an inflation of the self, a transcendental and orgiastic aggrandizement of matter and event on behalf of personal vitality. In the middle stages, the self begins to recoil from externality and devotes itself, almost as if it were the world's body, to a minute examination of its own inner dynamics: freedom, compulsion, caprice. In the late stages, there occurs an emptying out of the self, a revulsion from the weariness of individuality and psychological gain.... Modernism thereby keeps approaching—sometimes even penetrating—the limits of solipsism." Consider Howe's three‑stage dialectic of modernism in light of three modern British poets. Discuss two poems by each.

MODERN BRITISH NOVEL

Suggested Erich Auerbach, Mimesis

Readings: Irving Howe, Politics and the Novel

Frank Kermode, The Art of Telling

Arnold Kettle, Introduction to the English Novel

J. Hillis Miller, Fiction and Repetition

Raymond Williams, The English Novel

Richard Ellmann, James Joyce

Quentin Bell, Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf, "Mr. Bennet and Mrs. Brown" in TheCaptain's Deathbed

Jeffrey Perl, The Tradition of Return

William Noon, S. J., Joyce and Aquinas

Umberto Eco, The Aesthetics of Chaosmus

1. "For the moderns...the point of interest lies very likely in the dark places of psychology," writes Virginia Woolf in her essay "Modern Fiction." Similarly, Joseph Conrad writes about elemental savagery, among other more modern motives, in Heart of Darkness, a novella you may wish to consider. Derive a working definition of dark psychologies by examining specifically a central character in two or three twentieth‑century British novels.

2. In The End of the Tether by Joseph Conrad, Marlow tells the reader that the patriarchal but nearly blind Captain Whalley lived in an age of individuality that was ending. The old routes and ways were rapidly being replaced by the new—new sea lanes, new steamships, a host of interchangeable merchant marine officers, and a new scepticism. Consider the contrast between the past and the present in two or three novels of the period. You may wish to focus on the question of whether the days of individuality were over or just beginning.

3. By examining two or three novels by major modern British authors, assess the importance to them of the First World War, which was so often a dividing line in history. You may choose to take up novels like George Orwell's Coming Up for Air and Virginia Woolf's The Years or Between the Acts, or you may concentrate on other authors and titles.

4. In Axel's Castle, Edmund Wilson states that James Joyce has, in Ulysses, "exploited together, as no writer had thought to do before, the resources both of Symbolism and Naturalism." Discuss two episodes in Ulysses along these lines.

5. Like Henry James, E. M. Forster writes about the difference between both classes and cultures. Carefully discuss how two or three novelists of the twentieth-century British canon employ such contrasts to achieve particular thematic ends. How does Forster, for example, treat the English and Italians in Where Angels Fear to Tread and A Room With a View or the Schlegel and Wilcox families in Howards End?

6. In novels such as Arnold Bennett's Anna of the Five Towns and James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, organized religion figures importantly. How? Investigate three or four modern British novels for their authors' use of or commentary on church practice and its influence on the lives of their characters.

7. D. H. Lawrence's fiction is notably important for its incorporation of external nature into the physical and spiritual growth of his characters. Relate rural settings to the overall significance in two or three novels of the period. You may wish to consider the decline of country life, or its retreat from the commerce of the city, in your essay.

8. Why is Ulysses considered the culmination of Modernism? Comment on its overall structure and then discuss three chapters in detail.

9. One of the qualities that mark Conrad as a modernist is his conscious use (and violation) of narrative form. Indeed, narrative structure in Conrad can achieve such a complexity that how the tale is told almost becomes more important than the tale itself. What is at stake in Conrad's making the medium as important as—if not more important than—the message? Discuss this in relation to the specific content of narrative. Discuss Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, and one other narrative.

10. Many critics have maintained that the "applied Aquinas" of Stephen Dedalus's aesthetic theory in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man mirrored James Joyce's own aesthetic philosophy. In discussing whether you agree with such critics, analyze in detail Stephen's theory in A Portrait and Joyce's later treatment of it throughout Ulysses, particularly in the "Proteus" episode.

11. James Joyce once wrote, "I always write about Dublin, because if I can get to the heart of Dublin I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world. In the particular is contained the universal." Discuss this statement with reference to Ulysses, paying close attention both to the Homeric allusions in the book and the book's philosophical experimentation with some relevant tenets of Modernism.

12. What does the concern with autobiography and biography in Strachey, Forster, and Woolf reveal about the modern consciousness, especially its concern with character?

13. Discuss the Anglo-Indian contrast in Forster's A Passage to India and in two other novels of the modern period, such as those by Conrad, Orwell, and Green.

14. "'The truth is perhaps this: while we know the characters of Miss Austen as we know our friends (if we are abnormally observant), we know Mrs. Woolf's characters as we know ourselves.' This is a reference, of course, to the quality and not the quantity of knowledge involved. The effect of To the Lighthouse is absolute antithesis of flatness." Defend, refute, modify; in short, discuss, focusing perhaps on one character in any two novels by V. Woolf.

15. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar write of the position of the woman writer: "Before the woman writer can journey through the looking glass toward literary autonomy, however, she must come to terms with the images on the surface of the glass, with, that is, those mythic masks male artists have fastened over her human face both to lessen their dread of her 'inconstancy' and—by identifying her with the 'eternal types' they have themselves invented‑‑to possess her more thoroughly. Specifically...a woman writer must examine, assimilate, and transcend the extreme images of 'angel' and 'monster' which male authors have generated for her. Before we can write, declared Virginia Woolf, we must 'kill' the 'angel in the house.' In other words, women must kill the aesthetic ideal through which they themselves have been 'killed' into art." Discuss Gilbert and Gubar's thesis with regard to either A Room of One's Own or Three Guineas, and at least two of the following novels: Orlando, To the Lighthouse, Mrs. Dalloway.

MODERN BRITISH DRAMA

Suggested Raymond Williams, Drama from Ibsen to Beckett

Readings: Eric Bentley, The Playwright as Thinker

1. Eric Bentley observes that the rustle of bank notes can be heard throughout The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde. Discuss the significance of money, serious or otherwise, in the plays of three or four modern British dramatists. Do not omit Shaw.

2. One of the stock situations in modern British drama is that of the woman with a past. In the well‑made play, like Sir Arthur Wing Pinero's The Second Mrs. Tanqueray or W. Somerset Maugham's The Circle, such women may fall victim to tragic melodrama or to comedy. Consider this packaged plot and the treatment of it in plays by three or four writers, possibly including Wilde, Shaw, Coward, and T. S. Eliot.

3.. The playwright Bertolt Brecht observed of Shaw: "I get the impression that a lot revolves for him round a particular theory of evolution which in his view differs widely and decisively from another evolutionary theory of a clearly inferior brand. At any rate his faith in mankind's infinite capacity for improvement plays an overriding part in his works." Discuss Brecht's thesis in relation to two major plays by Shaw. Be sure to provide detailed assessment appropriate to the greater focus of this question.

4. There is in Shaw an element of agitprop. Shaw sought to use drama to change the ethical and political behavior of his audience. Yet he had to work within the context of a received dramatic tradition that fostered its own set of expectations on the part of the audience. Shaw, accordingly, had to violate certain conventions and expectations to achieve the effect he desired. Discuss the relation between formal innovation and politics in three plays by Shaw.

5. Eric Bentley has argued that modern drama is characterized by realism. The importance of modern drama, accordingly, is that it has developed a "middle genre" midway between tragedy and comedy, that is, "bourgeois tragedy." As Bentley notes: "The achievement of the middle genre was the discovery of a new tragedy, the tragedy of modern life." Discuss this notion of the relation between tragedy and realism in modern drama in one play by each of three dramatists.

6. Are the plays of Oscar Wilde concerned solely with verbal play and wit? Or is there some philosophical or social message behind his plays? Address this question in relation to two plays by Wilde.

7. G. B. Shaw is said to have introduced to Britain the Ibsenite "Drama of Ideas." What were Shaw's ideas? Consider three of his plays, early, middle, and late. You may wish to focus on how he reacted against his day, even against the "well‑made play" as practiced by his predecessors.

8. Discuss the shift from Realism to symbolic drama in two plays by Yeats.

9. In his furious response to Yeats's refusal to allow his play The Silver Tassie to be performed at the Abbey Theater, Sean O'Casey wrote: "I have pondered in my heart your expression that 'the history of the world must be reduced to wallpaper,' and I find in it only the pretentious bigness of a pretentious phrase. I thank you out of mere politeness, but I must refuse even to try to do it. That is exactly in my opinion...what most of the Abbey dramatists are trying to do—building up, building up little worlds of wallpaper, and hiding striding life behind it all...." Taking this statement as your starting point, examine two plays by O'Casey.

10. Yeats, Fry, and Eliot kept verse drama alive in the first half of the century. Examine a representative play by each, and indicate why its subject is appropriate to verse, or how each play achieves its thematic effect. Pay particular attention to the uses of realism and symbolism.

11. The “drawing room comedy” of Oscar Wilde flourished in the theatrical plays of Noel Coward, in the farces of Ben Travers, and to some extent in the sentimental melodrama of Somerset Maugham. Define the distinguishing aspects of this comedy, and show how it persists in specific works by two or three different playwrights.

CONTEMPORARY BRITISH POETRY

Suggested Seamus Heaney, The Government of the Tongue

Readings: _____________, Crediting Poetry: The Nobel Lecture

James Acheson and Romana Huk, Contemporary British Poetry

Andrew Motion, Philip Larkin

Helen Vendler, The Breaking of Style: Hopkins, Heaney, Graham

Keith Sagaried, The Challenge of Ted Hughes

Calvin Bediert, Eight Contemporary Poets

1. Philip Larkin's poetry—in its linkage of modern strategies with anti‑modernist sentiment—can be considered a sardonic commentary on the British poetic tradition. Discuss the issues of innovation and continuity in Larkin's poetry. Provide a detailed examination of at least three poems.

2. Contemporary British poetry may be read as a divided reaction to the impact of T. S. Eliot. Some poets, while not reveling in obscurity and cultural esoterica, are clearly continuing with the project of modernism. Other poets are instead eschewing the tenets of modernism altogether. Instead, they seek to achieve a poetic language that will render with clarity the world. Discuss this issue and then support your argument by examining three poems each by Geoffrey Hill and Thom Gunn or Seamus Heaney.

3. Derek Walcott's poetry performs a strange dialogue between English literary tradition and British imperial history. Discuss the impact of this post‑colonial perspective on the style and thematics of his poetry. Be sure to discuss Omeros.

4. Much of Ted Hughes's poetry explores humanity by means of a mythic exploration of animality. What does this notion of metamorphosis allow Hughes to accomplish? What is his vision of humanity? Examine three poems in detail—be sure to discuss "Crow."

5. Thom Gunn is a poet difficult to classify. His early poems display a classical, yet prosaic, sense of Metaphysical wit, while some of his more recent poems are open verse explorations of AIDS. While difficult to categorize, Gunn perhaps best strikes that balance between tradition and innovation. Discuss this balance—on both a formal and thematic level—in three of his poems.

6. Philip Larkin wrote of the process of writing poetry: "I write poems to preserve things I have seen/thought/felt (if I may indicate a composite and complex experience) both for myself and for others, though I feel that my prime responsibility is to the experience itself, which I am trying to keep from oblivion for its own sake.... As a guiding principle I believe that every poem must be its own sole freshly created universe, and therefore have no belief in 'tradition' or a common myth‑kitty or casual allusions in poems to other poems or poets, which I find unpleasantly like the talk of literary understrappers letting you see they know the right people." Larkin gives expression here to the general reaction in contemporary poetry against the dominance of the aesthetics of Eliot and Yeats. Examine two poems each by three poets that illustrate Larkin's statement.

7. Imagine you were editing something like the Norton Anthology of English Literature and you had to write the introduction to the section on contemporary British poetry. Discuss three poems in detail to substantiate your argument.

8. The critic Harold Bloom has written of Seamus Heaney: "Heaney was poised upon the verge of becoming a poet of the Northern Ireland Troubles, a role he now wisely seeks to evade, but in a morally rich sense of `evade.'" Discuss this notion of a morally rich evasion in three of Heaney's poems.

9. "Where Betjeman succeeds is in showing us with such skilled precision, how his beloved Victorian and Edwardian England has been almost swept away by the new England of coffee bars, television masts, mass‑produced goods, and miles of sodium‑lit suburbia, a world in which...regular attendance at the cinema is the ideal preparation for a funeral service in the crematorium." Discuss this statement in relation to three poems by Betjeman.

CONTEMPORARY BRITISH NOVEL

Suggested Donald Heiney, Contemporary British Literature

Readings: David Lodge, The Novelist at the Crossroads

Harvey Webster, After the Trauma

Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands

Peter Parker, A Reader's Guide to the 20th-Century Novel

Frederick Karl, A Reader's Guide to the Contemporary English Novel

Milan Kundera, Testaments Betrayed

Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium

1. At the death of George Orwell the philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote: "In our time the kind of man who, in Victorian days, would have been a comfortable Radical, believing in the perfectibility of Man and ordered evolutionary progress, is compelled to face harsher facts than those that afforded our grandfathers' polemics. Like every young man of generous sympathies, Orwell was at first in revolt against the social system of his age and nation, and inspired with hope by the Russian Revolution. Admiration of Trotsky, and experience of the treatment meted out to Trotskyists by Stalinists in the Spanish Civil War, destroyed his hopes of Russia without giving him any other hopes to put in their place.... Imagine Goethe, Shelley, and Wells confined for a year to Buchenwald; how would they emerge? Obviously not as they went in. Goethe would no longer be `the Olympian,' nor Shelley the `ineffectual angel', and Wells would have lost his belief in the omnipotence of reason. All three would have acquired knowledge as to the actual world, but would they have gained in wisdom?" Russell indicates here the unique position of the writer in the latter half of the twentieth century. The faith in progress, reason, and the humanity of man has crumbled in the face of World War II and the Holocaust. What impact does this position have upon such writers? Is the writer thereby granted a privileged vision or, as Russell suggests, is the writer somehow debilitated by this situation? Develop a critical response and then discuss two novels each by two of the following writers: George Orwell, William Golding, Anthony Burgess, Graham Greene.

2. What is postmodernism in literature? Give a literary, theoretical, and historical definition of postmodernism. Then consider these issues in light of one novel each by two writers—one of whom should be Julian Barnes.

3. Graham Greene was fond of using the forms of popular fiction as a vehicle for what might be termed morality plays. Discuss the moral lesson Greene sought to impart in two of his novels. Consider whether this lesson is impeded or complemented by its popular fiction context.

4. Samuel Beckett is often considered a key transitional figure between Modernism and Postmodernism. Unlike the High Modernists, who saw in fiction and language a rich medium for exploring consciousness and culture, Beckett presents a language exhausted by its own historical and philosophical heritage. Assess the contribution of Beckett to the English novel. Discuss two novels by Beckett—one from the Molloy trilogy and one other of your own choosing.

5. In a provocative essay entitled "`Commonwealth Literature' Does Not Exist," Salman Rushdie writes: "There is clearly such a thing as `Commonwealth literature,' because even ghosts can be made to exist if you set up enough faculties, if you write enough books and appoint enough research students. It does not exist in the sense that writers do not write it, but that is of minor importance. So perhaps I should rephrase myself: `Commonwealth literature' should not exist. If it did not, we could appreciate writers for what they are, whether in terms of its real groupings, which may well be national, which may well be linguistic, but which may also be international, and based on imaginative affinities; and as far as Eng. Lit. itself is concerned, I think that if all English literatures could be studied together, a shape would emerge which would truly reflect the new shape of the language in the world, and we could see that Eng. Lit. has never been in better shape, because the world language now also possesses a world literature, which is proliferating in every conceivable direction. The English language ceased to be the sole possession of the English some time ago. Perhaps `Commonwealth literature' was invented to delay the day when we rough beasts actually slouch into Bethlehem. In which case, it's time to admit that the centre cannot hold." Consider Rushdie's thesis in light of one novel each by two of the following writers: Rushdie, Anita Desai, Nadine Gordimer, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Patrick White, V. S. Naipaul, Doris Lessing, Margaret Atwood.

6. For some time now it has been repeated that the novel is dead. Defend or contradict this notion by examining one novel each by two of the following writers: Graham Swift, Patrick McGrath, Roddy Doyle, Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Anthony Powell.

7. Discussing the central importance of the novel—an importance announced at the origins of the genre and brought to fruition in modernity—Milan Kundera writes: "As God slowly departed from the seat whence he had directed the universe and its order of values, distinguished good from evil, and endowed each thing with meaning, Don Quixote set forth from his house into a world he could no longer recognize. In the absence of the Supreme Judge, the world suddenly appeared in its fearsome ambiguity; the single driving Truth decomposed into myriad relative truths parceled out by men. Thus was born the world of the Modern Era, and with it the novel, the image and model of that world." Discuss Kundera's notion of the novel as the genre most appropriate for our era in relation to one novel each by three novelists. Suggestions: Margaret Drabble, A. S. Byatt, Muriel Spark, Iris Murdoch.

8. Stephen Spender observed of Evelyn Waugh: "As with Chaplin, we can weep with the comedian when he is being tragic and sympathize with his problems, because we move from mode to mode of a true character portrayed. What we can least accept, though, is the sententiousness which Waugh, like Chaplin, sometimes assumes when he is being `serious.' The underlying seriousness of Waugh's novels lies not in their opinionatedness but in their narration of a search.... The search is religious and preoccupies the reader all the more because it is not his characters who are involved in it, but the writer himself." Discuss Spender's observation in relation to two novels by Waugh.

CONTEMPORARY BRITISH DRAMA

Suggested Raymond Williams, Drama From Ibsen to Beckett

Readings: J. R. Taylor, Anger and After

Martin Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd

1. What is the point of historical drama, as crafted by twentieth‑century British dramatists? How do they use the past to comment on the present? Think of such examples as A Man for All Seasons by Robert Bolt, The Madness of King George III by Alan Bennet, or adaptations like those by David Edgar of Nicholas Nickelby and of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

2. Theoretical reflection has consistently fallen short in its attempt to understand Beckett. What do we indeed make of Beckett's drama? What is the significance of his work for drama in general? In what way is it a commentary on drama as an art form? Consider two of the major plays such as Endgame, Waiting for Godot, Krapp's Last Tape, and Happy Days as well as one of the later, minimalist plays such as Not I, Footfalls, Ohio Impromptu, Rockabye.

3. Martin Esslin writes with regard to Harold Pinter: "Only when it was recognized that the verbal element need not be the dominant aspect of drama, or at least that it was not the context of what was said that mattered most, but the action which it embodied, and that inarticulate, incoherent, tautological and nonsensical speech might be as dramatic as verbal brilliance when it could be treated simply as an element of action, only then did it become possible to place inarticulate characters in the center of the play and to make their unspoken emotions transparent. Pinter is among the discoverers of this highly significant aspect of drama." Esslin's reflection is suggestive for all writers who employ elements of what has come to be termed the absurd. Consider Esslin's remarks about the meaning of non‑meaning in relation to both Pinter and Stoppard.

4 In Look Back in Anger John Osborne launched the drama of the so‑called Angry Young Men. Write specifically about the social or political concerns of Osborne and two or three other playwrights. Refer to individual plays.

5. Harold Pinter is a major voice in the renaissance in British drama that began with Beckett in the fifties. Taking his cue from Beckett, he perfected his own "comedy of menace." Explain this term by analyzing a Pinter play, and apply it to one or two other dramatists and their work.

6. Some of contemporary British drama has sought to achieve an effect of social consciousness while at the same time exploring the limits of the realist tradition. Such plays do not rely on straightforward realistic portrayal but on the Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt to force audiences to maintain a more distanced and critical perspective. Discuss the relationship between theatrical convention and social relevance in three plays by two of the following playwrights: John Arden, Edward Bond, David Hare, Howard Barker, Howard Brenton.

7. Are Alan Ayckbourn's plays, as some critics suggest, merely light comedy? Defend your answer by examining two of his plays. (The Norman Conquests counts as two plays).

8. Martin Esslin writes of contemporary drama: "The challenge to make sense out of what appears as senseless and fragmented action, the recognition that the fact that the modern world has lost its unifying principle...is therefore more than a mere intellectual exercise; it has a therapeutic effect." Write about two contemporary playwrights (drawing on two plays of each)—one of whom proves Esslin's thesis and one of whom disproves his thesis. You may wish to consider the following playwrights: Pinter, Schaffer, Stoppard, Ayckbourne, Beckett.

9. Often noted for its inflammatory politics, the drama of the Angry Young Man in Britain risks not only outrage—as in the onstage stoning to death of an infant in Edward Bond's Saved—but also dated preachment. How do the dramatic practitioners of liberalism or radicalism render it effective? Discuss three or four plays by as many playwrights.

10. Examine what Irish drama, by such playwrights as Brendan Behan and Brian Friel, says about the Irish and Ireland. Are these writers patriots, and what are their national concerns?

11. The "drawing room comedy" of Oscar Wilde flourished in the theatrical plays of Noel Coward, in the farces of Ben Travers, and to some extent in the sentimental melodrama of Somerset Maugham. Define the distinguishing aspects of this comedy, and show how it persists in specific works by two or three different playwrights.

12. Consider the kinds of comedy that recent British playwrights have chosen to employ, as well as how successfully they embody their purposes. You may wish to choose among the comedy of menace in Pinter, the deeply ironic comedy in Hampton and Hare, the black comedy in Ayckbourn, Frayn, and Orton. Discuss at least three plays by at least two playwrights.

13. Critics applaud the symbolic landscapes in the plays of Beckett. Discuss his employment of props and set to complement his characters. Examine fully at least two major plays, including and beginning with Waiting for Godot.

14. Explain why the appeal in contemporary British drama often lies in the flawed protagonist. Why has the antagonistic force been internalized in the plays of John Osborne, Arnold Wesker, John Arden, Edward Bond, Peter Nichols, and Peter Barnes? Begin with an analysis of the archetypal angry young man, Osborne's Jimmy Porter, and include an analysis of at least two other major figures in drama of the fifties, sixties, and/or seventies.

15. Plays like Caryl Churchill's Top Girls make feminism, in the broadest sense of the term, a primary theme. Examine the treatment of women in at least one play by Churchill and two other plays to be chosen from among the works of Wesker, Pinter, Ayckbourn, Shaffer, and Stoppard.