Modern British Literature

Current modernist scholarship includes Joyce, Beckett, Lawrence, Yeats, Woolf, Greene, and textual criticism (Friedman, Cullingford, Carter, Nehring), modernist fiction and poetry (Cullingford, Friedman, K. Heinzelman, Whitbread), modern and contemporary British Drama (Bruster, Cullingford, Friedman, Kornhaber, Loehlin, Richmond-Garza), Irish literature and cultural nationalism (Cullingford, Friedman), British and Irish film (Carter, Cullingford), contemporary and post-colonial British literatures (Carter, Richmond-Garza), Sexuality, Women's and Gender Studies (Cullingford, Carter), the Avant-garde (Nehring), and British Cultural Studies (Nehring, Carter).

More than forty faculty members teach graduate courses in the array of fields and critical practices that comprise British Studies, from traditional areas of historical study to postcolonial and poststructuralist reconsiderations of the limits and nature of such study. Course offerings cover all periods and genres. The particular strength of this concentration lies in its exploration of overlapping disciplinary perspectives, including new historicism, attention to canonicity and canon formation, dramatic theory and performance, cultural studies, rhetorical, historical and philosophical analysis, and examination of the role of poesis in literature.