Old English literature

- basic information about the Anglo-Saxons

- features of Anglo-Saxon poetry: pessimism, the notion of wyrd, alliteration, kennings

- basic Anglo-Saxon literary genres: the AS elegy, the epic

- works: Beowulf, The Wanderer, The Dream of the Rood

Medieval literature

- the Norman conquest and the rise of Middle English

- the continental influences in medieval English literature

- Sir Gawaine and the Green Knight as an example of chivalric romance

- the contrast between the Christian knight and the pagan hero

- Christianity and paganism in Sir Gawaine

- Canterbury Tales as an image of medieval English society

- Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron as an influence on Canterbury Tales

- The tales and their tellers in Canterbury Tales

- Medieval drama – mystery, morality and miracle play

16th and 17th-century English literature

- Elizabethan drama – the comparison with ancient drama

- The Elizabethan theatre building

- Christopher Marlowe – Tamburlaine the Great, Doctor Faustus

- William Shakespeare – Hamlet, Richard III, Tempest

- John Donne and metaphysical poetry

- John Milton, Paradise Lost (PL as an epic; the image of Satan in PL)

The beginnings of the novel

- The origin of the novel

- Robinson Crusoe – colonialism, racism, capitalism

- Gulliver’s Travels – satire, playing with colonial stereotypes

- Tristram Shandy – the self-conscious novel

English Romanticism

- Wordsworth&Coleridge – Lyrical Ballads (esp. the comparison with earlier 18th-century

poetry)

- Emily Bronte – Wuthering Heights

Victorian literature
- Robert Browning, Alfred Tennyson

- Charles Dickens – A Christmas Carol, Great Expectations, Oliver Twist