English Literature: Be as Informed as a Literature Graduate

Explore Old English and Anglo-Saxon literature, tracing Germanic roots and the later French and Latin influences, and the Christianization shaping Beowulf and other texts.

Examine the dream of the rood, the oldest English text found on the Ruthwell Cross and Vercelli Book, illustrating Christian and heroic traditions converging through runic and Old English translation.

Explore Beowulf, the famous Anglo-Saxon epic renowned for its alliteration, manuscript history in the Nowell Codex, two scribes, and a blend of pagan heroism with Christian elements.

This lecture analyzes the Anglo-Saxon poem Wulf and Eadwacer, exploring forbidden love, tribal feud, and women's roles within Old English society, with translations and context.

Learn how Anglo-Saxon texts were produced in monastic settings, with vellum from sheep, goose quills, and inks from oak galls and lapis lazuli, and risks like scribal palsy.

Explore later medieval period's shift to Middle English and how Norman conquest, Plantagenet patronage, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight reflect the shift from Latin and French toward English.

Study Geoffrey Chaucer, the father of English literature, and how the Canterbury Tales satirizes church corruption and politics, including the Pardoner's Tale and the Wife of Bath.

Explore how Mallory's Mort d'Arthur fuses French and English Arthurian legends, weaving Lancelot and Tristan tales, while revealing Thomas Mallory's controversial life writing in prison.

Examine the medieval alliterative romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a late fourteenth-century Arthurian tale of chivalry, test of nerve, and a cunning moral lesson from Morgan Le Fay.

Julian of Norwich is the earliest female English writer whose work survives; an anchorite in Norwich, her revelations of divine love were preserved by nuns.

Explore the English renaissance and its landmark writers like Shakespeare and Marlowe, and how the printing press and Reformation transformed language, authorship, and literacy.

William Shakespeare anchors world literature with unrivaled early modern English, masterful blank verse, and a diverse canon of comedies, histories, tragedies, romances, and sonnets.

Explore Christopher Marlowe, the leading Elizabethan tragedian and poet, whose mysterious life and murder influenced Shakespeare and whose works include Tamburlaine, Edward the second, and Dido.

Edmund Spenser helped found modern English poetry and authored the faerie queene, an allegorical epic praised by Elizabeth I. The lecture follows his social ascent, Ireland tenure, and patronage.

Explore John Milton, a monumental figure in world literature, and Paradise Lost in blank verse, a republican epic poem that justifies the ways of god to man.

Examine the rise of sensibility and its link to individualism in 18th‑century literature, through John Locke, Samuel Johnson, and Jane Austen, plus the critique of sentimentality.

Explore Samuel Richardson's role in shaping the novel through Pamela, a key sentimental, epistolary work, and its themes of virtue, sensibility, and social ascent.

Jane Austen transforms late 18th-century realism with sharp observations of women's economic roles and marriage, through six novels that challenge the cult of sensibility and spotlight practical love.

Explore Matthew Gregory Lewis's gothic horror, The Monk, its demons and the supernatural, and how anti Catholic themes and sexual repression fuel its lurid, influential shock.

Reveal how romanticism centers emotion and intuition, elevating individualism over reason and realism. Trace its medieval, nature-loving Gothic roots and global reach from Wordsworth to Poe.

Explore William Wordsworth, founder of English Romanticism, with Coleridge, through Lyrical Ballads, the Prelude, and poetry that emphasizes the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings, recollected tranquility, and nature in daffodils.

Explore how Samuel Taylor Coleridge co-founded the romantic movement with Wordsworth, shaping the Rime of the Ancient Mariner and its albatross, while navigating poetry, theology, and opium addiction in transcendentalism.

Explore Percy Bysshe Shelley as the prolific second-generation romantic and radical Prometheus, shaping non-violent protest, underground readership, and works like Prometheus unbind.

Discover Lord Byron, the bad boy of poetry, whose daring and generosity shaped romanticism. Trace his life as poet and revolutionary and Don Juan and she walks in beauty.

Explore John Keats, a second-generation romantic who wrote six years of poetry, renowned for sensual nature imagery and ode to a nightingale and on first looking into Chapman's Homer.

Explore how the Victorian era's industrial progress reshaped society and literature, from Dickens and the Brontes to Doyle and Wilde, through the novel's social change and gothic motifs.

Explore Charles Dickens as a prolific Victorian novelist, journalist, and social reformer who reveals poverty, education, and child rights through works like Great Expectations, Oliver Twist, and A Christmas Carol.

Explore the Brontë sisters' blend of romanticism and realism, their pseudonymous publishing, and key works like Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and Agnes Grey.

George Eliot, Mary Ann Evans, rose as a leading Victorian realist under a male pseudonym, authoring Adam Bede, the mill on the floss, Silas Marner, and Middlemarch.

Explore Alfred, Lord Tennyson, a towering Victorian poet laureate, author of In Memoriam and The Charge of the Light Brigade, and The Lady of Shalott, with romantic medieval imagery.

Explore early 20th century English literature shaped by the great war. From war poets like Wilfred Owens to modernists like Conrad and Woolf, the era emphasizes individualism and moral complexity.

Explore the first world war poets Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, and Robert Graves, whose gritty realism and anti-war voices challenged pro-war narratives and reshaped modern poetry.

Explore Rudyard Kipling's complex legacy, from imperialist visions and 'the white man's burden' to wartime verse and personal loss, including 'My Boy Jack' and 'The Gardener'.

Examine modernism in England, its relativism and push for artistic progress. Focus on the Bloomsbury set and its influence on literature through stream of consciousness and nonlinear storytelling.

Explore Virginia Woolf's modernist vision through stream of consciousness and feminism, highlighting Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and Orlando, set against Bloomsbury's literary world.

Explore E. M. Forster's portrayal of class, liberty, and social tension in a room with a view and a passage to India, highlighting colonialism and the individual's conflict with society.