Irish Lit Before 1900

3 Credits · Level: Undergraduate

This course will explore Irish literature written in English from the late sixteenth century to the end of the nineteenth, taking up questions of colonialism and revolution, gender and genre, nationalism and globalism, aesthetics and politics. It covers fiction and nonfiction prose, poetry, and drama, surveying the rich traditions of Irish writing in several genres. Authors may include Jonathan Swift, Edmund Burke, Sydney Owenson, Maria Edgeworth, Jane Francesca Wilde, Oscar Wilde, W.B. Yeats, and others. Throughout, we will consider how Irish writers both represented and critiqued the concept of the nation prior to independence.