ENG 2252
English Literature: Restoration through Victorian
Traynor Hansen
MWF 1:00-2:20 p.m.
English majors around the world usually take a year of literature survey courses such as SPU's own ENG 2251, 2252, and 2253 as the backbone to their study of the literary tradition in English.
It sometimes helps to think of the English literary tradition as itself a kind of story. And we come to understand that tale best through historical survey courses such as ENG 2252: Restoration through Victorian Literature.
This particular class -- ENG 2252 -- is “chapter two" of the literary and historical tale, academically speaking, where the story picks up after Beowulf, Shakespeare, and Milton's "Paradise Lost" (covered in ENG 2251) and moves forward through history all the way to the start of the twentieth century.
ENG 2252 covers the major authors and works of British literature from roughly 1660 (the "Restoration" of the monarchy in England -- lots of rowdy plays and poems) up through the Enlightenment (with moral and rational writers such as Pope, Johnson, and Austen), through Romanticism (poets of "feeling" and sensibility such as Wordsworth and Keats), and ending after surveying the monumental changes of the Victorian age (seen in writers such as Dickens).
By the end of the quarter, then, you should understand the basic outline of the whole British literary tradition—“surveying” this long and rich heritage from close range.
And also not surprisingly, perhaps, ENG 2252: English Literature: Restoration though Victorian is a core required course for all English majors at SPU, as well.