MA in English - Modernities: Literature Theory and Culture from the Romantics to the Present

University College Cork

This MA English - Modernities: Literature, Theory & Culture from the Romantics to the Present introduces you to the advanced study of American, British, and Irish literature and other cultural forms, from the eighteenth century to the present day, as well as to a selection of theoretical works pertaining to the concept of ‘modernity’. Under the guidance of leading scholars in their fields, our students encounter some of the most influential contemporary critical and theoretical models currently being applied to the notions of modernity and modernisation, and apply the ideas raised by these theories to a rich variety of works from the 1700s to the twenty-first century.On this prgramme you will also have the opportunity to be introduced to literary and theoretical texts that track Ireland’s historical and cultural experience of modernism, from the eighteenth century to the current day. Texts studied range historically from the writings of the great Irish satirist Jonathan Swift, those of such canonical Romantics as P.B. and Mary Shelley, influential modernist works by James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Virginia Woolf, and Samuel Beckett, to innovative recent and contemporary poets, novelists, dramatists, and filmmakers. Among theorists of modernity, you can expect to explore the thought of significant nineteenth-century thinkers, including Marx and Nietzsche, and to examine twentieth/twenty-first-century cultural theory in such fields as feminism, postructuralism, and postcolonialism. The encounter with these thinkers and movements will aid our students in debating and developing a deeper understanding and appreciation of the broader culture in this era.