British Literature

The British Literature concentration affords student the chance to study the deep and varied history of British and Irish literature that ranges over many centuries, to read texts from a wide variety of literary and cultural genres, and to employ a diverse range of theoretical approaches.  The British Literature curriculum will teach students to understand the works of familiar authors such as Shakespeare, Jane Austen and William Butler Yeats in their social and political contexts, and to analyze how categories like gender, sexuality, nationality, race, and class operate in fields such as Victorian poetry and avant-garde fiction.  Recent offerings include Nation and Gender in Irish Film, Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama, Abolition and 19th Century Literature, Victorian Historicisms, and the Modern British Novel.