“Is poetry a form of democracy? Can modern life be the subject of great writing, and can women produce it? Can a culture represent itself if it’s lost its language? English 116 familiarizes students with some of the broad trends, genres, and issues of British Literature by focusing on the idea of revolution (both as dramatic change and as the return of ideas) that pervaded the late eighteenth century, could be felt throughout the nineteenth, and erupted again with two world wars and decolonization. At the same time, the course structures opportunities for students to develop close reading and critical thinking skills. Through independent reading and class discussion, students learn to move from a text’s literal meaning to its symbolic significance and explore the way literature reflects, comments on, and shapes its cultural moment. Readings include works by Edmund Burke and Mary Wollstonecraft, William Wordsworth, John Stuart Mill and Elizabeth Gaskell, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and Seamus Heaney and others. This course satisfies the British Literature II (post-1800) requirement for the major, and is an elective for the English minor and Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities major.” – UNE course catalog