The Brontes' home town of Haworth, today
Top Withins, near Haworth
Literary Landscapes
This course will cover a range of authors whose work draws attention to the landscapes and peoples of the United Kingdom. Although the scope of the reading is broad, the course will concentrate on two thematic areas: 1) representations of 'the country and the city' and 2) literary tourism.
The first area addresses the issue of how authors were shaped by the rural or urban environments in which they wrote and how their work has, in turn, shaped those environments. We will look at the work of writers such as William Wordsworth, the Brontës, Charles Dickens, Virginia Woolf, Ted Hughes and Martin Amis, and examine the centrality of marginal and marginalised places and language to their work.
For each of these writers it was impossible to know who they were without understanding where they were, and we will consider how their poems, short stories and novels devise new ways of constructing and thinking about the relationship between human identity and its physical environment.
The second area looks at a range of travel literature, looking at how foreign writers have represented Britain and why this relatively recent genre of literature has so many of its roots in this country's soil. Contemporary travel writers like Bill Bryson and Susan Toth will be studied.
Classes each day will be structured around a combination of discussion, presentations and brief lectures. Outside the classroom we will tour the homes of the Brontë sisters, William Wordsworth and Charles Dickens, as well as attending plays and museums and discovering the Lake District, Yorkshire Moors and streets of London.
This course will be worth ten UK study credits. These usually equate to three US credits, however it is the prerogative of a student's home university to make the appropriate grade transfer so please consult your International Programmes Office.