Università Roma Tre

In this year's course we will examine some of the most important phenomena of British 19th- and 20th-century British literary culture: Romantic and Modernist poetry; female writing; the golden age of Irish literature; colonial and adventure fiction; the political novel; postcolonial literature. In particular, we will focus on those fin-de-siècle works that reveal a growing artistic self-consciousness on the part of some novelists and an influence of written prose on Modernist poets.

Fiction
Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, (1847) (romanzo)
Rudyard Kipling, “William the Conqueror (I & II) (1895) (racconto)
Joseph Conrad, The Shadow Line: A confession (1916) (racconto lungo)
James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1917) (romanzo)
George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) (romanzo)

Drama
Derek Walcott, Dream on Monkey Mountain (1970)

Poetry

Students will find the (about thirty) poems and critical essays in two publications which will be available before the beginning of the course. The discussion in class will focus in particular on the five Romantic poets, two Victorians - Robert Browning and Algernon Charles Swinburne - on W. B. Yeats, the American modernists T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, and on W. H. Auden and Derek Walcott.

Non-attending students will have to prepare one of these two novels:

Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Brodie (1961) (novel)
Hanif Kureishi, The Buddha of Suburbia (1990) (novel)

Storia della letteratura:
P. Bertinetti (a cura di), Breve storia della letteratura inglese, Einaudi 2004.

Bibliografia critica:
Questi sono i primi saggi/capitoli di libro relativi alle opere di narrativa. Ulteriori saggi verranno indicati durante il corso.
Richard Ambrosini (2019), “La Linea d’ombra. Una confessione”, in La storia delle storie di Conrad. Biografia intellettuale di un romanziere, pp. 302-312.(Disponibile in biblioteca)
Bulla, Guido (1989), Il muro di vetro. Nineteen Eighty-Four e l’ultimo Orwell, Bulzoni. (Estratti disponibili in pdf)
Capoferro, Riccardo (2015), “Providence, Anti-Providence, and the Experience of Time inThe Shadow-Line”, Conradiana, 47, i, pp. 17-42. (Disponibile in pdf)
Fausto Ciompi (2001), “Verso l’individuo. Sei paragrafi di critica swinburneana”, Il confronto letterario, 36, ii, pp. 391—435. (Disponibile in pdf)
Sandra M. Gilbert (1977), “Plain Jane's Progress”, Signs, 2, iv, pp. 779-804. (Disponibile in pdf)
Hugh Kenner (1948), “The Portrait in Perspective”, The Kenyon Review, 10, iii, pp. 361-381. (Disponibile in pdf)
Alex Tickell (2009), Kipling’s famine‐romance: Masculinity, gender and colonial biopolitics in “William the Conqueror”, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 45, iii, pp. 251-262. (Disponibile in pdf)
Helen Vendler, (1997), Poems, Poets, Poetry. An Introduction and Anthology, Bedford Books, Boston. (Estratti disponibili in pdf)

All materials will be made available on the Moodle platform.

This course provides a detailed analysis of some of the historical and cultural knots in English literature through the study of texts by some of the authors belonging to the British canon. The course will focus on topics, contexts and textual strategies with a view to underlining the literary representations of the city of London and of the river Thames as sites for passage, conflict, celebration, delusion and self-deception, utopia and creativity, etc. from the Nineteenth century to nowadays.

Literary texts (compulsory):
William Blake, London, Jerusalem, The Chimney Sweeper (I, II), Holy Thursday (I, II) [online];
William Wordsworth, Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802 [online];
John Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn [online];
Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist [any English unabridged edition];
Amy Levy, A London Plane-tree, London in July, A March Day in London [online];
Oscar Wilde, Impression du Matin, Symphony in Yellow [online];
Virginia Woolf, The London Scene [selected essays provided by the teacher];
Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway [any English unabridged edition];
Sam Selvon, The Lonely Londoners [any English unabridged edition];
Hanif Kureishi, Love in a Blue Time [selected essays provided by the teacher].

Lessons will be held in Italian and English and the texts used will be in English. Italian translations are not allowed. You can find the above texts 'online' at: Project Gutenberg and Poetry Foundation's websites. All the texts provided by the teacher will be uploaded on Moodle at the beginning of the course.