Programme: BA

Course: British Literature: Late Victorian to the Present

Semester: II
Code: OEN201

Objectives
• To introduce the students to the socio-political, religious and cultural
aspects of England through English literary texts
• To help the students realise the texts as products of historical, political
and cultural contexts
• To enable students identify different forms, genres and subgenres in
literature

Level of Knowledge: Working knowledge of English and literature

Module I: Background 10 hours

Middle, Late Victorian Age and After
Darwin and the publication of Origin of Species; Victorian morality; utilitarianism,
working class struggles; realism; naturalism, neorealism, Marxism
Alfred Lord Tennyson: Ulysses
Robert Browning: My Last Duchess
Matthew Arnold: Dover Beach
Gerald Manley Hopkins: God’s Grandeur
Charles Dickens: Hard Times
Oscar Wilde: The Importance of Being Earnest

Module II
Early Twentieth Century
Modernism; The World Wars; The Boer war; Russian revolution; Surrealism;
Cubism; Expressionism
W B Yeats: The Second Coming
T S Eliot: Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock
Virginia Woolf: A Room of One’ Own
George Orwell: Animal Farm

Module III
Late Twentieth Century
Postmodernism; Multiculturalism
Ted Hughes: The Thought Fox
Benjamin Zephaniah: Dis Poetry
John Osborne: Look Back in Anger

Note: The students should be able to identify major figures of speech, and rhetorical
terms, forms and genres of literature, forms and genres in poetry, drama and fiction.

Bibliography
Abrams, M.H. A Glossary of Literary Terms. 8th Ed. New York: Wardworth, 2005.
Corcoran, Neil. The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century English Poetry.
Cambridge: CUP, 2007.
Davis, Alex, and Lee M Jenkins. The Cambridge Companion to Modernist Poetry.
Cambridge: CUP, 2007.
Ferguson, Margaret, Mary Jo Salter and Jon Stallworthy. Eds. The Norton Anthology
of Poetry. 4th Ed. New York: WW Norton, 1996.
Gupta, Ambika Sen. Selected College Poems. Rpt. Hyderabad: Orient Longman,
1999.
Herman, Daniel. The Cambridge Companion to Narrative. Cambridge: CUP, 2007.
John, Eileen, and Dominic McIver Lopes. Philosophy of Literature: Contemporary
and Classic Readings. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004.
Kaplan, Fred, and Monod, Sylvere. Hard Times. New York: WW Norton, 2002.
Sampson, George. The Concise Cambridge History of English Literature, 3rd Ed.
Cambridge: CUP, 2005.
Ramarao, Vimala,. Ed. Explorations. Vol II. Bangalore: Prasaranga, Bangalore
University, 2004.

Notes:
1. For all texts Norton Editions are to be treated as the official prescribed
editions.
2. For critical material The Cambridge Companion Series of CUP, Case Book
Series of Macmillan and Palgrave, and Norton series of WW Norton are
officially prescribed.

Testing Pattern:
Section A: Short Notes – 4x5=20
4 questions to answer out of minimum 6
One question has to be annotation oriented.

Section B: Essay Question 3x10=30

3 questions to answer out of minimum 4.

End Semester and end semester pattern

Section A: Annotation 2x10= 20
Two stanzas from different poems to be given. Both compulsory.

Section A: Short Notes – 4x5=20

4 questions to answer out of minimum 6

Section B: Essay Question 6x10=60

Two each from poetry, prose and drama. Answer one from each genre compulsory.
6 questions to be answered out of minimum 8