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In 1900, various European countries – Britain, France, Germany, Austria – were competing with each other for imperial supremacy. Over the next five decades (as W. B. Yeats wrote in ‘Easter 1916’), ‘All changed, changed utterly’. In 1950 these European Empires had collapsed, or were in the process of collapsing, and Europe was divided by the ‘iron curtain’. Between 1914 and 1945 there were two world wars, the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, the Wall Street Crash and the Great Depression, the rise and fall of Fascism, aerial bombardment and destruction of cities, atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the Holocaust. World War Two was followed by the ‘Cold War’, and the world was still troubled by what Sigmund Freud, in a famous letter to Einstein, called the ‘well-founded dread of the form that future wars will take’.

The literature of this period is remarkable for its exciting explorations of race, gender, sexuality, nationalism, and conflict. The first three decades of the century saw the emergence of ‘modernism’, a difficult, self-consciously experimental literature. This module puts modernism at its centre, but also explores the ‘margins’ of modernism, and asks what happened after modernism. In the Autumn term lectures discuss our eight set texts: we study four literary figures who are absolutely central to modernism - W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf - but we also enlarge our modernist map, reading works by other authors, which may include Jean Toomer, Jean Rhys and Elizabeth Bowen, and Orson Welles.

Autumn term seminar groups will study four of these eight set texts (chosen by the seminar leader). Spring term seminars are sign-up options: topics for this year will be finalised and announced in October. Lectures in the Spring term continue to explore aspects of modernism, and of ‘counter-modernism’, and introduce some of the drama and film of the period.

Examination is by means of a written exam paper, or by Course Essay, if preferred and if no other Course Essay is being submitted by the candidate in that year.