Instructor:       Mr. Cantrell                            Office Hours:    By appointment
Room:              P-9                  
Phone:             237-3333                              E-mail:   AC68@aol.com
Go To Mr. Cantrell's American Literature Page

General Course Content:

I. The Middle Ages (ca. 476-1450)
(including parts of the Anglo-Saxon period)
Representative works including:


  • Beowulf –the Beowulf Poet
  • from Genesis —(ch. 1-3)
  • "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" —the Pearl Poet
  • The Canterbury Tales —Geoffrey Chaucer (1340-1400)
  • from Morte Darthur —Thomas Malory (1344?-1471)
 
II. The Renaissance (ca. 1450-1650)
Representative works including:
 
  • from The Fairie Queen —Edmund Spenser (1552-1599)
  • Macbeth , et al, and Sonnets—William Shakespeare (1564-1616)
  • The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus
    —Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593)
  • miscellaneous Renaissance poets, to be announced…

III. The Restoration & the 18th Century (1650-1798)
(also known as Neo-classicism)
Representative works including:
  • Robinson Crusoe —Daniel Defoe (1659-1731)
  • Gulliver’s Travels and "A Modest Proposal"
     --Jonathan Swift (1667-1745)
  • "The Rape of the Lock" and from An Essay on Man
     --Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
  • works by Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)
  • from The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D.
    —James Boswell (1740-1795)
  • "Rule, Britannia!"—James Thompson (1700-1748)
  • "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" --Thomas Gray (1716-1771)

IV. The Romantic Period (ca. 1798-1837)
Representative works including:
  • “Scots, Wha Hae” and “A Man’s a Man for A’That”
    --Robert Burns (1759-1796)
  • from “Songs of Innocence,” “The Lamb,” and “The Tyger”
    --William Blake (1757-1827)
  • from Lyrical Ballads —William Wordsworth (1770-1850)
  • The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan
    --Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)
  • “She Walks in Beauty”—George Noel Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824)
  • “Ozymandias”—Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)
  • “Ode to a Nightingale” and “Ode on a Grecian Urn”
    --John Keats (1795-1821)
 
V. The Victorian Age (ca. 1837-1914)
Representative works including:
 
  • works by Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881)
  • from “The Idea of a University”
    —John Henry Cardinal Newman (1801-1890)
  • from On Liberty —John Stuart Mill (1806-1873)
  • “You Ask Me, Why, Though I'll at Ease,” “Morte d’Arthur,”
    “Locksley Hall,” from “In Memoriam,” and from “Idylls of the King”
    —Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892)
  • works by John Ruskin (1819-1900)
  • works by Matthew Arnold (1822-1888)

VI. The Modern Period (ca. 1914-)
Representative works including:
  • works by Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)
  • works by Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
  • Heart of Darkness —Joseph Conrad (1857-1924)
  • “The Second Coming”—William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)
  • works by James Joyce (1882-1941)
  • “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and “The Waste Land”
    —T.S. Eliot (1888-1965)
  • Samuel Beckett (1906-     )
  • “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night”
    —Dylan Thomas (1914-1953)
  • 1984 —George Orwell


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