A study of selected forms of poetry such as the sonnet, lyric, ode, elegy, song, rap, ballad, monologue and free verse.

A historical and/or critical study of Children's Literature in English. Possible emphases include formal literary analysis, the social and cultural significance of works written for (or adopted by) children, and relationships between image and text in illustrated books.††

A study of the main patterns of tragedy from its origins to the 20th century.†

An exploration of many traditional and contemporary rhetorical techniques in a variety of texts. The course concentrates on the study of how examples of writing employ ideas of form, purpose, language and the arts of verbal persuasion.††

An introduction to literary stylistics – the application of linguistic theories to the study of literature. Selected texts will be explored in light of topics such as grammar and syntax, textualism (formalism) and contextualism (feminist stylistics, reader-response criticism).

A study of the main patterns of comedy from its origins to the 20th century.

Consult the Department of English for current offerings.††

A study of the ways in which literature of various periods and nationalities functions to criticize its milieu. Emphasis will be placed on the specific socio-historic contexts and ideologies of the period in which the works were written.

Prose fiction of present and former nations of the Commonwealth, including Australia, New Zealand, India, Africa and the West Indies.

Poetry and drama of present and former nations of the Commonwealth, including Australia, New Zealand, India, Africa and the West Indies.

Selected fiction, poetry and drama by United States authors whose major works have appeared in the period from about 1945 to the present.

An extension of the practices involved in reading written texts, literary and non-literary, to the interpretation of other cultural forms, (for example, film, graphics, TV programming). There will be some attention to theories that offer a general model for how meaning is constructed and exchanged.

A study of feminist writing, including drama, fiction, poetry, biography, memoirs, essays and journalism, with emphasis on the role of print culture as a forum for debate about women's rights in a given period.

A study of the influences and relationships between written/printed/literary texts and other media. Topics may include analysis of stage and film adaptations; television and video presentations; or paintings, photography and other popular forms.

An introduction to modern theories of language. The course will typically include basic study of the building blocks of language, such as sound-patterns, word formation, and sentence formation, together with the study of the major theories of meaning, the history of various language groups, and the changing role of language in the modern world. (Cross-listed as LL223.)†

The evolution of the English language with reference to the historical and cultural contexts in which it has developed and continues to develop. The course includes attention to Canadian English and its relation to General American and British English.†

Women writers and women's writing, with illustration of the literature of different historical periods and a variety of literary genres. Some special attention will be given to feminist literary criticism and theory and to such questions as whether there is a uniquely "female'' literary imagination.

The images of women in a selection of fiction by women (and some men) writers in the past 200 years, focusing primarily on the changing attitudes to women and the corresponding development of new techniques of presentation.†

An exploration of the history of English in Canada and the development of standard Canadian English. Although the course offers a contextualization of Canadian English within the history of the English language, central topics include Elizabethan English and the English of the thirteen colonies, colonial varieties of English imported to Canada, the impact of British dialects on Canadian English and Canadian dialects. (Web-based course)

The focus of this course is Arthurian romance in the context of new technological developments important to students of English literature. Students examine the medieval origins of Arthurian romance as well as selected modern adaptations within multi-media environments such as internet web sites, CD-ROM databases and computer analysis software. (No prior knowledge of medieval literature or computers is necessary.)†

A study of the interconnections between gender and genre in selected plays drawn from all stages of Shakespeare's development as a dramatist.

A study of representative tragedies and history plays, with an emphasis on their dramatic, theatrical and cultural contexts.

A study of the thematic and cultural significance of works, which use tropes of acting and performance, imagery of the theatre, and the play within the play to highlight issues of representation and gender.

A study of cinematic adaptations of the plays of Shakespeare.

An intensive exploration of the major fictional works of J.R.R. Tolkien. The works of other writers of fantasy, such as J.K. Rowling and C.S. Lewis, may also be considered.

An historical and critical survey of influential works in British literature from the Middle Ages to 1900.

Selected works by authors of major achievement and influence, such as Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman and Dickinson, with emphasis on the 19th century.

Selected works by major modern United States authors, such as Pound, Frost, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner and Stevens.

Canadian life and imagination explored in significant works by such writers as Atwood, Laurence, Watson, Cohen, Wiebe, Munro, Ross, Buckler, Richler, Carrier and others.

Canadian life and imagination explored through the study of significant works.

Canadian life and imagination explored through the study of key works of theatre and drama in Canada.

(Cross-listed as ID280.)

A study of traditional and current issues in the theory of criticism and literary history. The theoretical approaches to be examined normally include historicism, formalism, structuralism, psychoanalytical criticism, feminism, deconstruction, post-colonialism, Marxism and cultural studies.

This course will examine a wide range of poetry from the Romantic period, covering such subgenres as the Romantic lyric, verse narrative, ballads and gothic poems, as well as Romantic experimentation in the limits of genre. Poets to be discussed may include Blake, Burns, Byron, Coleridge, Hemans, Keats, Landon, Moore, Robinson, the Shelleys and the Wordsworths, among others.

This course will address the wide range of dramas read and staged in the Romantic period, from farces to tragedies and from lyrical dramas to gothic spectacles. Authors may include Baillie, Byron, Coleridge, Lefanu, "Monk" Lewis, P. B. Shelley and Starke, among others.

This course will select works from the considerable range of prose narratives in the Romantic period: from political novels to gothic tales of terror, from the novel of manners to the moral tale, and from autobiography and travel writing to history. Authors to be studied may include Austen, De Quincey, Edgeworth, Lewis, Maturin, and the Shelleys, among others.

This course involves the study of 20th-century British poetry, fiction and essays before the Second World War (1900-1939). The course will focus on the literary experiments of modernist writers such as James Joyce, T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf. These authors will be read alongside their contemporaries whose work represented a range of tendencies, such as Thomas Hardy, Charlotte Mew, W.B. Yeats, D.H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield and E.M. Forster.

This course involves the study of early 20th-century poetry, fiction and drama during 1900-1939. The course will focus on the relationship between literature and major social/political movements, and historical events of the period, such as Irish nationalism, the women's movement, the labour movement and World War I. Authors may include W.B. Yeats, Sean O'Casey, G.B. Shaw, Elizabeth Robins, Alice Meynell, Wilfred Owen, George Orwell and W.H. Auden.

An examination of various forms of fictional and non-fictional prose narratives. Works may include autobiography, biography, contemporary films, travel narratives, diaries, romances or popular forms such as the detective novel and horror stories.

Advanced consideration of questions of form, content, and ideology in contemporary media, as these questions contribute to an understanding of the nature of media and communication within our culture and in relation to the traditional study of print media.

An advanced study of the means and methods of persuasion in written discourse, with emphasis on the various uses of rhetoric in essays, journalistic articles and literary texts.†

Consult the Department of English for current offerings.††

An examination of literary representations of physical, economic, social and political instabilities and upheavals. The course will consider ways in which transgressive acts against authority of the law serve to interrogate the boundaries between self and other, between a culture's desires and fears.

Plays by selected 19th- and early 20th-century dramatists. Special emphasis will be placed on Ibsen and Strindberg.

Recent prose, poetry, drama and fiction-theory contributions to literature in Canada by women from various communities and perspectives. Questions of gender and sexuality, ethnicity, race and class considered alongside contemporary developments in literary theory and practice.

A study of fiction by 20th-century women writers of racial minorities in America and Canada in light of current feminist theory.

An examination of developments in realism, expressionism and absurdist theatre in the 20th century.

Intensive exploration of selected contemporary theories of literary and/or cultural studies.††

A study of the rise of the novel from its beginning as "true history," factual fiction, travel narrative and romance to the development of genres such as memoirs, the comic, picaresque, the sentimental and gothic novel. This course explores the connection between social and cultural history and literature, between Enlightenment thinking, domesticity and sensibility, between subjectivity, power, desire and representation.

A critical and cultural survey of the flourishing of the novel as a literary form during the Romantic and Victorian periods. Six representative works are usually selected for study, with emphasis on form, narrative technique and social context (including class and gender). Authors often chosen include Jane Austen, Walter Scott, Mary Shelley, Charlotte Bronte, Emily Bronte, Charles Dickens, George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans), Wilkie Collins, W.M. Thackeray, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Elizabeth Gaskell, Thomas Hardy and Oscar Wilde.

Development of the novel since 1900 with emphasis on social context and on developments in theme and technique.†

(Cross-listed as ML350.)

The study of a wide variety of issues and topics in Restoration and 18th-century British Literature. Attention is given to both canonical and non-canonical authors. Topics may include representations of authority in Restoration theatre, neoclassical theories of literature, the rise of the novel, experiments in genre, and issues of power and gender.

Specific exercises in various modes and forms guide writers to an exploration of the language and structure of poetry.

Structure, plot, diction, and characterization will be explored through writing and reading short stories.

A study of the grammar, linguistic background and cultural context of Old English, with an examination of texts such as elegies, feud narratives, saints lives and erotic riddles.

A study of Old English literary works in the context of the language and culture, with an examination of texts which represent major traditions, such as the oral, heroic, mythological, historical and religious traditions.

A study of selected comic and romance episodes from The Canterbury Tales, typically including The General Prologue, The Knight's Tale, The Miller's Tale, The Reeve's Tale, The Wife of Bath's Tale and other related tales.

A study of Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, selections from The Canterbury Tales and the minor poems.

An exploration of writers and genres representative of the Middle Ages. Genres might include romance, allegory, visionary works and dramas; writers might include William Langland, Sir Thomas Malory, Margery Kempe, or Julian of Norwich. Typically, this course will not include works by Chaucer.

In this course, we will study a selection of 16th-century poetry, drama and prose, together with other art forms and cultural discourses that contributed to early modern ideologies and constructions of gender, the body and the state. The texts to be studied include Thomas More's Utopia; Elizabeth Joscelin's The Mother's Legacy to her Unborn Child; poetry by Shakespeare and by English and continental women writers; selections from Spenser's Faerie Queene; Marlowe's Doctor Faustus; and Elizabeth Cary's The Tragedy of Mariam.

The course considers a range of plays by playwrights other than Shakespeare. Plays to be studied will vary from year to year.

The course considers a range of poetic forms employed in the early modern period. Texts and writers to be studied will vary from year to year.

Critical study of significant literary interventions in the cultural formation of Victorian England (1830-1860). In particular we examine the responses of novelists, poets and other writers to emerging issues of social power and conformity, individual liberty, "progress," industrialism, imperialism, gender and class. The literary treatment of these concerns is explored in relation to developments in genre and narrative form, to emerging mass readerships, and to theories of literature as "a criticism of life." Authors often selected for study include Arnold, Alfred Tennyson, Charlotte and Emily Bronte, Elizabeth and Robert Browning, Elizabeth Gaskell, John Ruskin and Charles Dickens.

Critical study of change and resistance in later 19th-century English literature (1860-1900), with some emphasis on writings involved in symptomatic critical and public controversies, from the so-called "fleshly school of poetry" (the PreRaphaelites) to the notorious Decadent Nineties and the trial of Oscar Wilde. The exploration of other literary cultures or communities might include the Aesthetic Movement, the pseudonymous "Michael Field" (a collaboration of two women poets), the cult of sensation fiction, and the increasingly sharp tensions between writers and the "Victorianism" of their public readership and reviewers. Authors often selected for study include Christina and Dante Rossetti, George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans), Wilkie Collins, Gerard Manley Hopkins, "Michael Field" (Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper), Lionel Johnson, Oscar Wilde and Thomas Hardy.

This course studies the shift in aims, structures and techniques that revolutionized literary writing in the English-speaking world from roughly 1950 to 1980. Particular emphasis will be placed on tracing how and why the ideal of the beautifully-crafted literary work was rejected and replaced by new forms of freedom and exploration.

This course places emphasis on "contemporary writing," the writing of 1980 to today. Particular attention will be given to the increasing emphasis on the "role of the reader" as an active participant in the experience of reading.

An exploration of various theories of language, style, discourse and/or rhetoric. Topics studied may include the cultural history of the English language, stylistics, linguistics, oral and discourse theory in film, media, literary and non-literary texts.

Consult the Department of English for current offerings.

A study of selected texts which interrogate the representations, definitions and boundaries of femininity, masculinity and/or queer subjectivities. Of special interest is the relationship between societal norms, power and sexuality in the different periods and cultures which give rise to these texts.

An exploration of contemporary genre theory and generic practices. Topics may vary among the following: historical literary genres, modern literary and non-literary genres, hybrids and or/speech genres.

An examination of important pieces from the oeuvre of a major author. Topics may include: the career and development of the author; the ways genre, history and/or biography affect writing.

An exploration of a significant literary movement, rise of an intellectual tradition, or response of a group of writers to a specific historical event.

A study of the ways in which literary texts develop from, or respond to, particular literary, cultural, aesthetic, political, historical and/or social contexts.

An exploration and analysis of cultural signifying practices with respect to various textual forms including, but not limited to, literary texts, films, television, visual art and music. Topics may include representations of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, race and class.

A study of one or more significant theoretical schools. Examples may include psychoanalysis, deconstruction, gender theory, Marxism, postcolonial and discourse theory.

Individual study on a specialized topic, under the supervision of a faculty member.