Department of EnglishLater British Literature

Recent Undergraduate Courses in Later British Literature

ENGL 3308: British Romantic Literature

Dr. Marjean D. Purinton, Fall 2025, Onsite

The British Romantic Period (1780-1830) was a time of social upheaval, political change, religious uncertainty, familial disruptions, class destabilizations, scientific and educational revolutions, explorations, commercialism, industrialization, and colonial activity. At the heart of all tensions was the question of human rights—for women, for slaves, for the working poor, for the disabled, for the elderly, for the colonized. It was a revolutionary time when literature challenged and championed the prevailing attitudes, customs, laws, and lifestyles. This era reflects remarkable transformations that underpin both modern and postmodern thought, and you will be amazed as the connections between Romanticism and contemporary culture and writing. We will survey representative and diverse literary selections from British Romanticism that address the period’s historical and cultural issues. Our learning activities will include secondary-source discovery activities, short critical essays, and discussion generated by an engaged learning community informed by feminist pedagogy.

ENGL 3309: Modern British Literature

Dr. Jen Shelton, Fall 2025, Online

"Make it new," Ezra Pound declaimed, and Modernist artists from Picasso to Virginia Woolf made it so. Faced with a technological world more like the one we live in than the ones their parents knew, Modern writers sought innovative forms to capture the experience of living in a cosmopolitan, industrialized world. This world offered opportunity, such as votes for women and struggles against imperialism, but it also offered disconcerting change as societies moved away from their agrarian pasts into a new world whose structure and meaning they did not yet understand. World War I was a modern war; the wristwatch was a modern invention. Modern people experienced a radical, exciting, terrifying shift in the world as the 20th century was born. In this course, we will read major works of the period, setting them into their sociohistorical context.

ENGL 4321: Studies in Literary Topics: Children's Literature in Britain and the World

Dr. Dana Aicha Shaaban, Fall 2025, Online

In this course, we will be focusing on what makes children's literature for children. To do so, we will be asking questions such as, What are the characteristics of children's literature? When did children's literature become a genre? What makes it for children rather than for adult readers? How does its intended audience shape its form, content, and style? To investigate these questions, we will learn about the history and development of children's literature, especially the role that oral storytelling traditions and fairytales played in that process; read primary texts from both the western and non-western world; and critically engage with novels for children and young adults from Britain, America, and the rest of the world, spanning the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries. Most importantly, we will be examining the ideologies embedded in the texts, as well as ideologies that guide our culture, particularly in terms of children and the literature they read.