"These fragments I have shored against my ruin"
The speaker of T. S. Eliot's The Wasteland utters these cryptic words amid the despair of a post-World War I Europe, a war fought according to Ezra Pound for "a botched civilization ... For two gross of broken statues, / For a few thousand battered books."
But what books they were and still are--brilliant, beautiful, painful, provocative, alive in their own time and alive in ours. Our whirlwind survey of three centuries of British literature will provide at best an aerial view of the landscape from eighteenth century satire to twentieth century absurdism, with Romanticism, Realism, and all kinds of strangeness between.
What's New
Reading (and Thinking) Questions for Rossetti's "Goblin Market" (PDF)-
Format of the Midterm (PDF)
- Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience (illuminated texts) (ENGL 467 web site)
- Audio Recordings of Some Romantic Poetry (ENGL 467 web site)
- From Neoclassical to Romantic (images)
- Resources for 18th Century Response
- Norton Anthology Summary
- Holt Literature Summary
- Neoclassicism at Victorian Web
- Notes Page