The course will trace the cultural conditions and social energies that articulated poetry in Britain from 1700 to the early twentieth century. Such an articulation is based on four stages: first, we will consider the so-called “Age of Pope” and the Augustan Age, studying the historical and material conditions in which poetry was created in the first half of the eighteenth century. We will read poems representing the major forms of the period: satire, wit, the pastoral, and the mock-heroic. We will then focus on other poetic movements and modes from the eighteenth century, like the “Graveyard School” and the early Romantic mode. Second, we will read and study the major authors of British Romantic poetry and its historical contexts, analyzing the transition from the Enlightenment to Romanticism. In the third stage of this course we will read Victorian poetry, paying special attention to classical models used for poetic form, and examining ideological issues like nationhood and empire. The final and four part of the course will explain the rejection of the Victorian mode, the rise of avant-garde, and the formation of Modernism.

El curso conduce a una aproximación a los grandes debates estéticos e ideológicos en el marco de la poesía inglesa de los períodos indicados con el fin de dotar al estudiante de un conocimiento general y amplio de la rica variedad de contextos poético-culturales de la literatura inglesa y de su influencia posterior. La asignatura proporciona también los instrumentos necesarios para el autoaprendizaje y el pensamiento crítico, así como las competencias lingüísticas y otros conocimientos necesarios en el marco del Grado de Estudios Ingleses, capacitando al estudiante para su futura formación en otros estudios que proporcionen complementos profesionalizantes o dirigidos a estudios de postgrado y al desarrollo de una vocación científica. 

1. The Enlightenment and Eighteenth-Century Poetry: Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, and others. Aesthetics, Politics, Art

2. The Graveyard School. William Collins, Thomas Gray, and others.

3. Romanticism. Aesthetics, Politics, Art. 

4. Victorian poetry. The Pre-Raphaelite School and the late Victorians. Art and Decadence.

5. Modernity and Modernism. Art and the Avant-Garde.