British Literature and Culture: 17th - 20th centuries

Волкова Е.И., Комков О.А.
РИМО, 3 курс, 2 семестр, Великобритания

British Literature and Culture: 17th - 20th centuries


Course objective: This course is designed to introduce students to some of the major themes in British intellectual, political, and literary culture of the 17th - 20th cc. Our aim is to understand how the literature of the period is a reflection of wider political and intellectual currents and why certain forms and themes became dominant in certain periods.

The course is broadly organised chronologically but also problematically, it emphasizes recurring archetypes and themes in their reference to the issue of the national identity. Some topics are presented from the British-Russian comparative perspective.

Forms of teaching: lectures and seminars. Lectures give an idea of the major currents in British culture and literature while seminars give an opportunity to do close reading analysis and explore the complexity of the literary text through discussions, presentations and creative writing/performance.

Requirements: reading quizzes; oral and written examination; term paper. For the paper, students will select a 20th century short story and analyze it in terms of the title metaphor, mode of speech, focus, character, story, cultural issues, co-authoring and comparative perspective.


Recommended literature:

1. John Donne.(1572-1631) The Good Morrow. Good Friday. A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning. The Dreame. Holy Sonnets: This is my play's last scene, Batter my heart, three-person'd God. Death be not proud.
2. George Herbert (1593-1633). Easter Wings. The Collar. The Altar. Man.
3. Robert Herrick (1591-1674) To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time.
4. Andrew Marvell (1621-1678) To His Coy Mistress. The Definition of Love.
5. John Milton. (1608-1674). On His Blindness. Paradise Lost.
6. John Bunyan. (1628-1688). The Pilgrim’s Progress.
7. John Dryden (1631-1700) Absalom and Achitophel.
8. Daniel Defoe (1660-1731). The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe.
9. Jonathan Swift.(1667-1745). A Tale of a Tub . Gulliver’s Travels .
10. Henry Fielding (1707-1754). Tom Jones.
11. Laurence Sterne (1713-1768). Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy.A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy.
12. Alexander Pope (1688-1744). The Rape of the Lock. Ode on Solitude. The Universal Prayer.
13. William Blake (1757-1827). Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.
14. William Wordsworth (1770-1850) Preface to Lyrical Ballads.(1798) We are Seven. The World is Too Much With Us.
15. Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834). The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Cristabel. Kubla Khan. (1798) The Epitaph.
16. George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824). Manfred. Cain. They say that Hope is Happiness. Darkness.
17. Percy Bysshe Shelly (1792-1822) Men of England. Ode to the West Wind.
18. John Keats (1795-1821) On a Grecian Urn.
19. Walter Scott (1771-1832) The Tale of Old Mortality.
20. Charlotte Brontë (1816-1855) Jane Eyre.
21. Charles Dickens (1812-1870) Christmas Carol. Great Expectations .
22. Oscar Wilde (1854-1900). The Picture of Dorian Gray. De Profundis.
23. Lord Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892) The Lady of Shalott.
24. Robert Browning (1812-1889). My Last Duchess.
25. Gerald M. Hopkins (1844-1889) Pied Beauty.
26. William B. Yeats (1865-1939) Easter 1916. The Circus Animals’ Desertion.
27. T. S. Eliot (1888-1965). Murder in the Cathedral. The Waste Land. Burnt Norton (from “Four Quartets”)
28. George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950). Pygmalion.
29. Joseph Conrad (1857-1924) Heart of Darkness.
30. D.H.Lawrence. (1885-1930). Sons and Lovers. England, My England.
31. James Joyce (1882-1941). Dubliners. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Ulysses.
32. Virginia Woolf (1882-1941). Mrs. Dalloway. Modern Fiction.
33. George Orwell (1902-1950). Animal Farm.
34. J. R. R. Tolkien (1892-1973). Leaf by Niggle.
35. C. S. Lewis (1898-1963) The Great Divorce. Till We Have Faces.
36. Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966). Brideshead Revisited: the Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder (1945). Helena (1950).
37. Aldous Leonard Huxley (1894-1963) On the Road to Rome.
38. Graham Green (1904-1990) End of the Affair
39. William G. Golding (1911- 1993) Free Fall. Darkness Visible. Lord of the Flies.
40. Samuel Becket (1906-1989) Waiting for Godot.
41. John Fowles (b. 1926). The Collector. The Maggot.
42. Anita Mason (b. 1942). The Illusionist.


Literary Criticism and Culture Studies


• Beach J.W. The Twenties Century Novel. Studies in Technique.
• Bentley G.E.,Jr. 1999. The Stranger from Paradise: William Blake
• British Cultural Studies.Geography, Nationality, and Identity. Ed. David Morlev and K.Robins.
• Contemporary Novelists. Ed. J.Vinson.
• Storey J. Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: an Introduction,
• Kenneth Brodey. Fabio Malgaretti. Focus on English and American Literature.
• Life Conquers Death: Religion and Literature.
• North M. The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language and Twentieth-Century Literature.
• Seventeenth-Century English Poetry. The Annotated Anthology. Ed.T.Dawson, R.C.Dupree.
• Studying British Cultures. Ed. S. Bassnett
• The Cambridge Guide to English Literature.
• The New Pelican Guide to English Literature.
• The Norton Anthology of English Literature.
• The Oxford Anthology of English Literature.
• Tillyard E.M.W. Some Mythical Elements in English Literature.
• Алябьева Л. Литературная профессия в Англии в XVI-XIX веках.
• Волкова Е. Сюжет о спасении в русской, английской и американской литературе.
• Горбунов А.Н. Шекспировские контексты.
• Горбунов А.Н. Джон Донн и английская лирика XVII века.
• Павловская А.В. Англия и англичане.
• Эко У. Поэтики Джойса.



Week 1.

The British 17th and 18th centuries comprised a period of unparalleled religious, political, and economic revolution that simultaneously brought about a re-evaluation of what it meant to be a civilized human being. One way to measure the results of this evaluation is to investigate the complex ways in which British writers represented themselves and the universe.

Metaphysical Poets. Meaning of the term: baroque poetry, mannerism, discordia concors, macrocosm and microcosm, intellectualism, combination of religious, philosophical, lyrical, and scientific mentality and vocabulary. Conceits, or extended metaphors, paradox, antinomy, ambivalence of the verse. Colloquial language, style experiments.

John Donne: love poems and Holy Sonnets. Catholicism and Protestantism in Donne’s works. Prose works: sermons and a treatise on suicide Biathanos.

George Herbert: priest and poet. Church architecture and symbolism in poetry: The Temple. Hieroglyphic poems and variations in the graphical layout of the stanzaic forms. Easter Wings. The Altar.Herbert’s preverbial ministry.

Andrew Marvell: conceits, rhythm, oxymoron, love theme. Metaphysical and Cavalier aspects. The Definition of Love.

The reception of Metaphysical poets in Russia: translations, Donne and Brodsky.

Metaphysical poetry and 17th c. British musical traditions: conceits and consorts, meditation and In Nomine pieces, variation and fancy, passion and contemplation, polyphony of discourse (Holborne, Ferrabosco, Hume, Byrd, Ward, Dowland, Lawes).

Week 2.

Civil War and Restoration. The Commonwealth. The Puritans. The Authorized Version of the Bible. Book of Common Prayer.

John Milton as a central figure of the period. His political and literary carrier. The blindness theme. Visions of Heaven and Hell in Milton, C.S.Lewis’ Great Divorce and Tolkien’s Leaf by Niggle. Classical and Biblical sources of the epic. The Renaissance tradition: titanic imagery, the humanist perspective. Dramatic elements, non-linear chronology. Epic as a synthetic genre. Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained. God and Satan, Good and Evil, Redemption story. Milton about Russia. Milton and Russian Literature: Pushkin, Lermontov, Dostoevsky, Bulgakov.

Week 3.

John Bunyan’ s The Pilgrim’s Progress. Allegory, juxtapositions, biblical allusions. Bunyan’s idea of salvation. Pilgrimage theme in Chaucer and Bunyan. Protestant anti-Catholic culture, Dissenting ministry. Bible as supreme authority.

John Dryden in the political and religious context of his time. Absalom and Achitophel as a satire.

Week 4.

The Augustan Age. Whigs and Tories. Hanoverian Kings. Philosophical Rationalism. Industrial Revolution. Reading Public.
Literature of Sensibility: nature, purity, social vices, power of friendship and love.
New types of the novel.

Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. The Natural Man archetype. Divine Nature vs Civilization. Island symbolism and its significance for British culture. The reception of Defoe in Russia.

Week 5.

State/Man relationships. Jonathan Swift as dean, political and religious thinker, poet, prose writer. The Battle of the Books, A Tale of the Tub.

Gulliver’s Travels: State, political life, agreement, impeachment, family culture, “man at close”, odyssey motifs, Laputa as symbol of government, utopia or dystopia (Houyhnhnms). Swift as critic of the natural Christianity. Evil symbolism in Swift. “Yahoo syndrome” in modern Russia. Struldbrugs and the immortality theme in English literature. Swift and Irish issue. Irish-British relationships. Swift and Gogol: British and Russian political satire.

Week 6.

Enlightenment and Literature of Sensibility. Development of the English novel: moralizing tendency, morality and Christianity, psychological characterization, epistolary technique, authenticity of the narrative, fiction posing as truth.

S.Richardson, H.Fielding, L.Sterne. Tom Jones: “New province of writing” (Fielding) – a comic epic poem in prose, a new narrative persona, journey story, speculations and commentaries, conversational style, “not man, but manners”, liberal generosity, humour and irony. Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy: L.Sterne and J.Locke, associations, inner consciousness, fictional time and space, textual experiment, playing with the reader.
Sterne and the 19th c. Russian novel.
Locke, Stern and 20th c. interiorized textuality.

Week 7.

Alexander Pope: a Catholic outsider. Dryden’s poetic legacy, political satire, elegant style, neo-classicism.

William Blake – a Pre-Romantic prophet, visions, illuminated printing, the fearful symmetry of “Songs of Innocence” and “Songs of Experience”, imagination as the “divine sparkle”, mysticism, anti-rationalism. Songs of Innocence and Experience: ignorance and endurance, Christian imagery, symbolism of childhood, a mytopoetic dialectic of the human condition. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: contraries, evolution, paradox, visions and proverbs of hell, subtext, God and Genius, Good and Evil ambivalence. Prophesies, mythology, a new religion.

Week 8.

Romanticism. Historical and social context: French revolution, war with France, Catholic emancipation, the Reform Bill of 1832, rural and industrial change, urban population, rustic vs. urban life, commercialism.

Literary context: sentimentalism, graveyard poets, elegiac poets, Nordic and Celtic mythology, Gothic novel (M.Shelley’s Frankenstein), German Romanticism in literature and philosophy, “poet and the crowd” theme, power of imagination, exotic setting, nature poetry, poetic diction and common speech, ballads, lyric, blank verse.

W.Wordsworth and S.T.Coleridge. Lyrical Ballads: the Preface as a manifesto, themes, genres, and style. Wordsworth’s reform of poetic subject and language.

Colerige’s argument with Wordsworth in Biographia Literaria. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Kubla Khan, Cristabel: Coleridge’s mysticism, visions, symbolism, biblical allusions, oriental motifs. Coleridge as an English Schellingianer, idea of the primary and secondary imagination as a romantic modification of the imago Dei paradigm. Coleridge and Russian Literature: Pushkin, Lermontov, Tolstoy, Balmont. Gumilev’s translation of The Rime.

Week 9.

G.G.Byron, P.B.Shelley, J.Keats. The Byronic hero: brooding, mysterious, haunted by his guilty past, lonely, charming. Manfred: immortality and oblivion, man and shadow, a poetics of ghost-like obscurity. Cain: a mystery play, biblical story, major philosophical and theological issues, story symmetry. Don Juan: Byron and Pushkin.

Shelley’s rebellious spirit, atheism and pantheism, from the political ballad to the classical elegy.

On a Grecian Urn : Keats’s cult of beauty and the nature of aestheticism, “holiness of the heart’s affection and the truth of imagination”, Greek and Medieval sources of his poetry, Spenserian and Miltonic legacy.
The reception of English Romanticism in Russia.




Week 10.

Historical novels of Walter Scott: Scottish customs and traditions, historical setting, dynamical narrative, characters, man at war. Scott and Pushkin.

The Victorian Age: British empire, Victorian ethos, political developments, Victorian family, education, reading public.

The Social Problem Novel: Elizabeth Gaskell, the Bronte sisters, Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, William Thackeray, Anthony Trollope, George Eliot. The Governess Novel: feminine narrative, story, setting, characters, denouement.

Charles Dickens’ world: social criticism, humour, sympathy and sentimentality, childhood and adulthood, mysticism, London myth, religious commitment. Dickens and Dostoevsky. Christmas story in English culture.

Week 11

English Children’s Literature: Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Oscar Wilde’s fairy tales. The role of Children’s Literature in British culture. Form and subcontext. The world of adults seen/judged through the eyes of a child. Modern Children’s Literature and classical traditions.

Oscar Wilde: writer, art for art’s sake preacher, Aesthetic prince, wit, dandy, gay martyr, sensitive soul, laughing stock, broken heart, prisoner, Narcissus, Dionysus-Apollo, Catholic convert, tragic genius. Irish, Classical Greek, Renaissance, Pre-Raphaelite aspects. The Picture of Dorian Grey as a parable about life/art and beauty/soul relationships. De Profundis in the broad context of confessional literature, aesthetic perception of Christianity.

Week 12

Victorian Poetry:
Alfred Tennyson: ‘the inward perfection of vacancy’, meditations on mortality and death, philosophy and style, Arthurian legends, technical mastery. The Lady of Shalott, Morte D’Arthur. Malory and Tennyson.

Robert Browning: Romantic influence, religion ideas and motifs, musicality, dramatic monologue, love lyrics, innermost conflicts of the character. My Last Duchess, Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came. Browning and Shakespeare.

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood: John Millais, William Hunt, Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Renaissance art, naturalistic details, anti-Victorian ideas, sensual atmosphere, fantasy and reality, enigmatic symbolic forms. Swinburne and Pre-Raphaelites. Pre-Raphaelites and Russian Silver Age.

The Oxford Movement: Cardinal Newman and Gerald Manley Hopkins. Catholic Renaissance. Old English and Welsh alliterative traditions, religious background and themes, prayer as genre. Pied Beauty.



Week 13

The 20th century: the Edwardian Age, Parliamentary reforms, the First World War, Ireland, rich and poor gap. Literary context: age of uncertainty, Darwin and Freud, avant-guard in art and music, Futurism, Dada, Cubism, literary experiments, Russian influences, modernism.

William Butler Yeats: influence of Ezra Pound, philosophical and mystical symbolism, visions, Celtic mythology, Irish Renaissance, political ideas. Easter 1916. The Circus Animals’ Desertion

T.S.Eliot: Metaphysical tradition, religious revival, influence of French symbolism, disillusion, modernist fragmentation, stream of consciousness, death metaphor, time and eternity, spiritual malaise, cryptic allusions, literary criticism. The Waste Land, Murder in the Cathedral T.S.Eliot and Brodsky. British-Russian play: T.S.Eliot, Elizabeth Roberts. Mark Rozovsky’s Murder in the Cathedral (in memory of Fr. Alexander Men’). Four Quartets: speculation and mystical experience, the Dantesque discourse, influence of San Juan de la Cruz, musical metaphorical paradigm (Beethoven’s last quartets as a formal stimulus) and its implications.


Week 14

The 20th century Drama.

George Bernard Shaw: Irish background, social problems, comedies of idea, paradox mastery, irony, maxims, ambivalence. Pygmalion and My Fair Lady musical.
B.Shaw in Russian theatres.

Samuel Beckett: Proust and Joyce’s influences, Theatre of Absurd, Beckett’s influence on Harold Printer and Tom Stoppard. Waiting for Godot: Albert Camus’ ‘boredom of waiting’, existentialism, tramps as outsiders, divine fools, biblical allusions to the Second Coming, symbolism of names, things, and gestures, impossible questions, anxiety, suicidal motifs, master and man theme, tree as life and death, manipulation with time, static forms, repetitions of words and actions, activity and inactivity, anti-climaxes, nothingness, despair, and hope.

Week 15

The 20th century Novel.

French and Russian influences in Joseph Conrad, D.H.Lawrence, Virginia Wolf , and James Joyce. Dystopia and totalitarian future: Aldous Huxley and George Orwell.

James Joyce: Irish background, religious and intellectual controversies, anti-clericalism, modernist epic, stream of consciousness, complexity, day microcosm, humour and humanity. Dubliners: Joycean idea of epiphany, Gothic archetype of the Haunted House. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: key moments/epiphanies in Stephen Daedalus’ development. Ulysses: time and space, themes, symbolism, psychoanalysis, complexity, fluency, characters, historical background, Dublin myth, censorship and a dramatic scandalous story of publishing the novel in France, the USA, Great Britain, and Russia. Umberto Eco’s Le Poetiche di Joyce: epiphany as experience and as a function of art, poetics of expressive form, remodeling the universe via mythopoetic construction, metamorphosis, Proteus poetics, ambiguity, fluidity of discourse, elimination of abstract oppositions. Joyce and 20th c. literary development.

Virginia Woolf: life as inner experience and its elusive nature, impressionist techniques, psychoanalytic discourse, the conception of time. Mrs. Dalloway. Modern Fiction as a modernist manifesto, “materialists” and “spiritualists”. Woolf’s worldwide influences (G. Garcia Marquez, M. Kundera etc.).

Joseph Conrad: Polish and Ukrainian background, sailor and artist, doubt and vagueness of the narrative, journey into the subconscious, darkness metaphor, moral lesson. Heart of Darkness.

David Herbert Lawrence: American influence, penetrating analysis of relationships between the sexes, marginal spontaneous characters of gypsies, miners, gamekeepers, a generation gap, psychological insight, an obscenity trial. Sons and Lovers. England, My England: instinct and ratio, contemplation and pragmatics, passion, duty and authority, symbolic detail.


Week 16

William Golding: post-war syndrome, intrinsic corruption of human nature, allegorical narratives, nature of evil, island dystopian symbolism, visions of childhood, autobiographical elements, confessional story, Miltonic motifs. The Lord of the Flies, Free Fall, Darkness Visible.

C.S. Lewis: the myth about Cupid and Psyche in Till We Have Faces, Platonic discourse, eros and religious experience, Deus absconditus and revelation, eidos and mask.

John Fowles: the ego and the self, the human and the subhuman condition, degradation and development, social issue, the power of art, dogmatics vs. freedom. The Collector: allusions to Shakespeare and de Sade, the initiation model and its distortions, collecting as appropriation vs. creation, contrast of confessional perspectives, choice and challenge of an everyman. The Maggot: a 17th c. British fancy, stylistic effects, comparing epochs, fantastic elements, the issue of religious experience and moral freedom, symbolism of transformation and rebirth.

Anita Mason: “postmodernism” of antiquity and the new era of Christianity in The Illusuonist, magic vs. faith, knowledge vs. love, eros and agape, Simon the Magus and his teachings as a Gnostic anticipation of Faustian discourse, true and false creation, “illusionism” as the Zeitgeist of the postclassical epoch, the spiritual controversies of the 1st and 21st c. AD.

Conclusions: Literature and British culture, the Land of Poetry and Drama, mysticism, social, religious and metaphysical dimensions, classical literature and mass culture, verbal and video culture, literature and education, British and American Literature, literature and national identity. Russian-British connections.















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