Voices of Dissent: British Literature since Modernism - Einzelansicht

This M.A. course will be an online course (!) with alternating group work phases and  plenum Zoom sessions.

There has been debate about modern British identity and its history that suggests anything but a monolithic phenomenon and relates to categories of gender, class, race, politics, nationhood, etc.. A close look at the many hegemonic and non-hegemonic voices in British culture shows, in fact, a long line of dissenting, radical, subversive protagonists in British culture. The course addresses the relationship between various literary forms, negotiations of British identity and attempts to perhaps raise public awareness. Canonical writers such as Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, W.H. Auden, Sam Selvon, and Jackie Kay are placed alongside less well known authors.

Basically, the course has a chronological structure and the intention is to address:

• late Victorian English writing;
• critiques of Edwardian society in terms of degeneration;
• changes in society, gender roles and culture in the shadow of the First World War;
• the rise of fascism in the 1930s;
• and after 1945, writing about mass immigration to Britain and provocative rethinking of gender role.

Dissent is s broad concept, thus we include texts as diverse as Tressell’s influential socialist novel The Ragged Trousered Philanthropist and Barbara Pym’s Excellent Women – a compassionate, ironic and problematic depiction of the lives of middle class women in the years after the Second World War. Drawing on post-colonial studies’ debates on national identity, current debates on Britishness from the last decade will be included.