Module Information

This module introduces students to the distinctive features of post-war literature through detailed engagements with texts in a range of genres: drama, poetry, and the novel. The focus is upon writers and texts from Britain and Ireland, though the concerns of several of these texts with cultural hybridity and post-colonial identities will form the basis of discuss. Thematic lectures on ‘Theatre of the Absurd’, ‘Post-war poetry’, and ‘Postmodern fictions’ will offer historical, literary-historical, social, and political contextualisation, as well as explaining key critical terms and concepts. At the core of the module, however, are detailed engagements with a small number of carefully-chosen texts, which will be interpreted from a variety of critical and theoretical perspectives. Students will be encouraged to relate post-war literary texts to a wider ‘postmodern condition’ from which they arise; to think critically about the ways in which issues of class, gender, or racial difference inform late-twentieth-century texts; and to explore the formal or generic features that are distinctive of literature in this period.