Eng.(M.A.), Sem-II | BURDWAN UNIVERSITY

Eng. (M.A.), Semester - II (Syllabus)

Paper 201 & 202: Eighteenth Century English Literature I and II

The Eighteenth century course (I and II) exposes students to the coming of Enlightenment modernity, print cultures, Romantic sensibilities, and the emergence of new genres (and modes) such as the novel, the periodical essay, gothic narratives, children’s writing; sentimental literature, travel narratives, life narratives and more. These emergent genres operating within the oral-literate dynamic; engaging with technological innovations and cross-cultural concerns (as a result of imperial expansions) now demand newer and more complex modes of reading-response. The course hopes to sensitize students to the same.

Paper 201: Eighteenth Century English Literature I

Unit I (Any three)

Aphra Behn: Oroonoko,

Daniel Defoe: Moll Flanders/Robinson Crusoe (HL)/Roxana, The Fortunate Mistress,

Eliza Haywood: Fantomina, or Love in a Maze,

Fanny Burney: Evelina: Or the History of a Young Lady’s Entrance into the World,

Jonathan Swift: Gulliver’s Travels,

Lawrence Sterne: Tristram Shandy,

Henry Fielding: Tom Jones/Joseph Andrews

Unit II (One play and two prose work)

Dr. Samuel Johnson: Rambler: (No. 134. 1751),

Joseph Addison: Spectator (Selections),

James Boswell: Life of Samuel Johnson(Selections),

John Dryden: Translation of Plutarch’s Lives,

Alexander Pope: Translation of Homer’s Iliad,

John Dryden: Aurangzebe,

Richard Steele: The Conscious Lovers,

Richard Brinsley Sheridan: The School for Scandal,

William Goldsmith: She Stoops to Conquer,

William Hogarth. The Rake’s Progress

Paper 202: Eighteenth Century English Literature II

Unit I (Any three)

Mary Shelley: Frankenstein: or The Modern Prometheus,

Horace Walpole. The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story,

M.G. Lewis: The Monk: A Romance,

Samuel Richardson: Pamela or Virtue Rewarded,

Maria Edgeworth: Castle Rackrent,

Walter Scott: Ivanhoe/Rob Roy/Waverly,

Jane Austen: Northanger Abbey /Mansfield Park/Sense and Sensibility

Unit II: (Any three)

John Dryden: Macflecknoe;

Alexander Pope: Dunciad/An Essay on Man Epistle One;

William Cowper: The Task (Selections); The Diverting History of John Gilpin (Selections);

William Thomson: Seasons (Selections);

William Collins: “Ode on the Death of Mr. Thomson”, “Ode Written in the Beginning of the Year 1746”;

Thomas Gray: “Elegy written in a Country Churchyard”,“Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat”;

Felicia Hemans: Casabianca, The Better Land;

William Blake: Songs of Innocence/Songs of Experience (Selections)

Paper 203 & 204: Nineteenth Century English Literature I & II

The nineteenth century literature course (I and II) focuses on the crystallization of British cultural supremacy in the known world. It engages students with ‘Victoriana’ that is cultural assumptions of the period of Queen Victoria’s rule. It includes literary texts that engage with concerns as varied as industrial conflict, urbanization, crime, detection and horror, life-writing, scientific and technological speculation, women’s issues, children’s issues, education experiments, spiritual and paranormal research, fantasy and nonsense. The course gives the students a feel of the exciting experiments in the field of literature.

Paper 203: Nineteenth Century English Literature I

Unit I (Two novels and two poets)

Charlotte Bronte: Villette/Jane Eyre,

Emily Bronte: Wuthering Heights,

Charles Dickens: Bleak House/Great Expectations,

Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell: North and South/Mary Barton,

George Eliot: Middlemarch/Mill on the Floss,

William Makepeace Thackeray: Vanity Fair/The History of Henry Esmond

William Wordsworth: The Prelude (Selections),

Samuel T. Coleridge: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,

Lord Byron: Don Juan (Canto I-IV),

Percy Bysshe Shelley: Prometheus Unbound,

John Keats: “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, “Ode to Psyche”, “Ode on Melancholy”

Unit II (Any one novel and two prose writers)

Lewis Caroll: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass,

Arthur Conan Doyle: The Hound of Baskervilles/The Sign of Four,

Wilkie Collins: The Moonstone,

George du Maurier: Trilby,

W. Rider Haggard: Allan Quatermain/ King Solomon’s Mines

Edmund Burke: Reflections on the Revolution in France,

Thomas Paine: The Rights of Man (selections),

Mary Wollstonecraft: Vindication of the Rights of Woman,

William Godwin: An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice,

Thomas Malthus: An Essay on the Principle of Population,

Percy Bysshe Shelley: “England in 1819”,

Benjamin Disraeli: Sybil, or The Two Nations

Paper 204: Nineteenth Century English Literature II

Unit I (Any one novel and two poets):

George Gissing: New Grub Street/The Unclassed,

Anthony Trollope: Barchester Towers/The Way we live now,

Thomas Hardy: Jude the Obscure/ Tess of the d’Urbervilles,

Samuel Butler: Erewhon/Ernest Pontifex or The Way of All Flesh

Lord Alfred Tennyson: In Memoriam/ The Lady of Shallot;

Robert Browning: “Andrea Del Sarto”, “Fra Lippo Lippi”;

Christina Georgina Rossetti: Goblin Market and Other Poems (two from this book);

Thomas Hardy: “In Time of ‘The Breaking of Nations’, “Between us Now”;

John Henry Newman: Apologia pro Vita Sua;

Margaret Oliphant: The Autobiography of Margaret Oliphant;

John Stuart Mill: Autobiography

Unit II (Any one novel and two prose writers):

John Ruskin. King of the Golden River,

Charles Kingsley: The Water Babies: A Fairy Tale for a Land Baby,

H.G. Wells: The Invisible Man/ Time Machine,

Jules Verne: Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea/ Around the World in Eighty Days (translation from original French),

Arthur Conan Doyle: The Lost World,

Edwin Arnold: The Light of Asia (Translation, life of Gautama Buddha) /The Song Celestial (Translation of Bhagwat Gita)

Matthew Arnold: Culture and Anarchy (selections),

Thomas Carlyle: Chartism, “The Sign of Times”,

Walter Pater: The Renaissance,

John Ruskin: Unto this Last/ Stones of Venice,

Charles Darwin: On the Origin of Species (1859)/The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, Sigmund Freud: Unheimlich (Tr. Uncanny)

205: Literary Criticism: Renaissance to Modern

The course introduces students to critical theory, the ideological assumptions that underpin and shape literature. Tracing aesthetic thought from Sidney to I.A. Richards the course prepares students to think of literary texts in terms of structures.

Unit I (Any three)

Philip Sidney:An Apology for Poetry,

John Dryden: Essay on Dramatic Poesie (Selections),

Alexander Pope: An Essay on Criticism,

Joseph Addison: The Pleasures of Imagination

Samuel Johnson: From Preface to the Plays of Shakespeare

Unit II (Any three)

William Wordsworth: Preface to Lyrical Ballads,

S. T. Coleridge: Biographia Literaria (xiii, xiv, xviii),

Matthew Arnold: “Function of Criticism at the Present Time”,

T.S. Eliot: “Tradition and the Individual Talent”,

F.R. Leavis: “Reality and Sincerity”,