OBJECTIVES
LECTURE
A survey course in 20th-century English literature. A basic outline of canonical writing is presented in chronological fashion, based on the consensus of traditional literary historiography. This map of English literature is supplemented by lectures on the most vibrant alternatives to the generally accepted styles and genres. Furthermore, the course provides an outline of related literatures in English – Irish, Scottish, diasporic, colonial and post-colonial – and charts their interactions with English literature on the one hand, and their mutual cross-fertilization on the other.
SCHEDULE 4 Oct Introduction; Fiction I: Towards Modernism – From Conrad to Lawrence (Beran) 11 Oct Poetry I: Poetry and Politics (Poncarová) 18 Oct Scottish Literature (Poncarová) 25 Oct Irish Literature (Pilný) 1 Nov Fiction II: Modernism and its Legacy (Vichnar) 8 Nov British Drama 1900-1945 (Wallace) 15 Nov Poetry II: Poetry and Gender (Theinová) 22 Nov Poetry III: Poetry and Place (Theinov á) 29 Nov Fiction III: 1950-1970 (Beran) 6 Dec Fiction IV: 1970-present (Beran) 13 Dec British Drama after 1945 (Wallace) 20 Dec Diasporic Writing and “New Literatures in English” (Nováková) 3 Jan, 10 Jan reserve
BASIC BIBLIOGRAPHY
Fiction I
Hilský, Martin. Modernisté. Praha: TORST, 1995.
Stříbrný, Zdeněk. Dějiny anglické literatury II. Praha: Academia, 1987.
Stape, J.H, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Messenger, Nigel. How to Study an E.M. Forster Novel. London: Macmillan, 1991.
Bowering, Peter. Aldous Huxley: A Study of the Major Novels, London: Athlone, 1968.
Poetry I
Corcoran, Neil, ed. Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century British Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Day, Gary, and Brian Docherty, eds. British Poetry from the 1950s to the 1990s: Politics and Art. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1997.
Das, Santanu, ed. The Cambridge Companion to the Poetry of the First World War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
David, Alex, and Margaret Lee Jenkins, eds. A History of Modernist Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.
David, Alex, and Margaret Lee Jenkins, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Modernist poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
“Discovering Literature: 20th Century”. British Library. https://www.bl.uk/20th-century-literature.
Johnston, John H. English Poetry of the First World War. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015.
“Poets”. Poetry Foundation. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets.
Tearle, Oliver. The Great War, The Waste Land and the Modernist Long Poem. London: Bloomsbury, 2019.
Scottish Literature
Craig, Cairns. The History of Scottish Literature (Volume 4: 20th century). Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1989.
Craig, Cairns. The Modern Scottish Novel: Narrative and the National Imagination. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000.
Crawford, Robert. The Penguin History of Scottish Literature. London: Penguin, 2007.
Hall, Simon. The History of Orkney Literature. Edinburgh: John Donald, 2010.
McCulloch, Margery Palmer. Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918-1959. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009.
Scottish Poetry Library, https://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk.
Smith, Mark Ryan. The Literature of Shetland. Lerwick: Shetland Times, 2014.
Thomson, Derick. An Introduction to Gaelic Poetry. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001.
Watson, Roderick. The Literature of Scotland: The Twentieth Century. Houndmills: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007.
Whyte, Christopher. Modern Scottish Poetry. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004.
Whyte, Christopher, ed. Gendering the Nation: Studies in Modern Scottish Literature. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1995.
Irish Literature
Kelleher, Margaret and Philip O’Leary, eds. The Cambridge History of Irish Literature, Vol. 2, 1890-2000. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
Quinn, Justin. The Cambridge Introduction to Modern Irish Poetry 1800-2000. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
Foster, John Wilson, ed. The Cambridge Companion to the Irish Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
Grene, Nicholas and Chris Morash, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Theatre. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.
Jordan, Eamonn and Eric Weitz, eds. The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Irish Theatre and Performance. London: Palgrave, 2018.
Fiction II
Bradbury, Malcolm and David Palmer, eds. The Contemporary English Novel. London: Edward Arnold, 1979.
Gasiorek, Andrzej. Post-War British Fiction – Realism and After. London: Edward Arnold, 1995.
Head, Dominic. The Cambridge Introduction to Modern British Fiction, 1950-2000. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
British Drama 1900-1945
Eyre, Richard and Nicholas Wright. Changing Stages: A View of British Theatre in the Twentieth Century. London: Bloomsbury, 2000.
Innes, Christopher. Modern British Drama: The Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992; 2002.
Luckhurst, Mary ed. A Companion to Modern British and Irish Drama 1880-2005. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006.
Poetry II
Corcoran, Neil, ed. Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century British Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Day, Gary, and Brian Docherty, eds. British Poetry from the 1950s to the 1990s: Politics and Art. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1997.
Dowson, Jane. Women, Modernism and British Poetry, 1910–1939: Resisting Femininity. Florence: Taylor and Francis, 2016.
Dowson, Jane, and Alice Entwistle, eds. A History of Twentieth-Century British Women's Poetry. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Dowson, Jane, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century British and Irish Women's Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
Stevens, Hugh, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Gay and Lesbian Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
Darcy, Ailbhe and David Wheatley, eds. A History of Irish Women’s Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021.
McMillan, Andrew, and Mary Jean Chan, eds. 100 Queer Poems. London: Vintage Publishing, 2022.
Poetry III
Bate, Jonathan. The Song of the Earth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020.
Corcoran, Neil, ed. Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century British Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Day, Gary, and Brian Docherty, eds. British Poetry from the 1950s to the 1990s: Politics and Art. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1997.
Burt, Stephanie. From There: Some Thoughts on Poetry and Place. Vancouver: Ronsdale Press, 2016.
Cooper, David, and Alexander Neal, eds. Poetry & Geography: Space & Place in Post-war Poetry, 2013.
Davie, Donald. With the Grain: Essays on Thomas Hardy and Modern British Poetry. Manchester: Carcanet, 1998.
Lindstrom, Susanna. Nature, Environment and Poetry: Ecocriticism and the Poetics of Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes. London: Routledge, 2015.
Picot, Edward. Outcasts from Eden: Ideas of Landscape in British Poetry since 1945. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1997.
Smith, Stan. Poetry and Displacement. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2008.
Sen, Malcolm, ed. A History of Irish Literature and the Environment, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022.
Fiction III
Morrison, Blake. The Movement. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980.
Bergonzi, Bernard. The Situation of the Novel. London: Penguin, 1972.
Hilský, Martin. Současný britský román. Praha: H&H, 1992.
McCarron, Kevin. William Golding. Plymouth: Northcote House, 1994.
McSweeney, Kerry. Four Contemporary Novelists, London: Scolar Press, 1983.
Fiction IV
Hilský, Martin. Současný britský román. Praha: H&H, 1992.
Bradford, Richard. The Novel Now. Oxford: Blackwell, 2007.
Caserio, Robert, ed. The Cambridge Companion to the Twentieth-Century English Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
Franková, Milada. Britské spisovatelky na přelomu tisíciletí. Brno: Masarykova universita, 2003.
British Drama after 1945
Elsom, John. Post-War British Theatre Criticism. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981.
Hayman, Ronald. British Theatre Since 1955. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979.
Innes, Christopher. Modern British Drama: The Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992; 2002.
Kritzer, Amelia Howe. Political Theatre in post-Thatcher Britain 1995-2005. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
Rebellato, Dan. 1956 And All That. London: Routledge, 1999.
Russell Taylor, John. Anger and After. London: Methuen, 1969; The Second Wave. London: Eyre Methuen, 1971.
Shellard, Dominic. British Theatre Since the War. London: Yale University Press, 1999.
Sierz, Aleks. In-Yer-Face Theatre: British Drama Today. London: Faber, 2001.
Wallace, Clare. Suspect Cultures: Narrative, Identity, Citation in 1990s New Drama. Praha: Litteraria Pragensia, 2006.
Diasporic Writing and “New Literatures in English”
Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin. Key Concepts in Post-Colonial Studies. London: Routledge, 1998.
Boehmer, Elleke. Colonial and Postcolonial Literature, 2nd edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Donnell, Alison and Sarah Lawson Welsh. The Routledge Reader in Caribbean Literature. London: Routledge, 1996.
Gopal, Priyamvada. The Indian English Novel: Nation, History, and Narration. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.
Hodge, Robert Ian Vere and Vijay Mishra. Dark side of the dream : Australian literature and the postcolonial mind. North Sydney : Allen and Unwin, 1991.
Innes, C. L. A History of Black and Asian Writing in Britain, 1700-2000. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
King, Bruce, ed. The Commonwealth Novel Since 1960. Macmillan, 1990.
King, Bruce, ed. New National and Post-Colonial Literatures: An Introduction. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1