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Students who have completed this course are familiar with the representation of city and countryside, and the stereotypes involved, also in national and international projections of this dichotomy. They can analyse the political and aesthetic dimensions of representations of landscape and cityscape in various genres, and articulate ideas about its present-day relevance. They can carry out basic research tasks, and report on their findings in a coherent and formally correct research paper.
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The course studies the impact on English literature and culture of two of the most important developments of the last 500 years: industrialisation and the concurrent urbanisation, which began in England. In the light of Raymond Williams's canonical "The Country and the City" as well as more recent ecological (or "green") reflections on the issue, students study the representation of the divide between country and city, and the rise of (old and new) genres that are linked to these developments, such as the pastoral, the city comedy, the country house poem, and later also the pre-romantic and romantic landscape lyrics. The course will also study the transference of the discourse of the dichotomy between city and country to the divide between centre and periphery in a national sense (e.g., Scotland vs. England) and in a colonial context (projections of pastoral ideals to overseas dominions).
This course is the second course in specialization History, Genre, Identity: English Language and Literature in Context.
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