An introduction to the poetry and nonfiction prose of the Victorian period, 1837-1901. Representative authors are studied in the context of a culture in transition, in which questions about democracy, social inequality, the rights of women, national identity, imperialism, and science and religion are prominent.
Pre-1900 course

An exploration of major dramatic tragedies in the classic and English tradition. European philosophers and literary critics since Aristotle have sought to understand and define the genre of tragedy, one of the oldest literary forms in existence. In this course, we will read representative works of dramatic tragedy and investigate how tragedy as a genre has evolved over the centuries.
Pre-1900 course

An historical exploration of comedy as a major form of dramatic expression. Comedy, like its more august counterpart tragedy, has been subjected to centuries of theoretical deliberation about its form and function. In this course, we will read representative works of dramatic comedy and consider how different ages have developed their own unique forms of comedy.
Pre-1900 course

A study of fairy tales in English since the eighteenth century. Fairy tales have been a staple of children’s literature for three centuries, though they were originally created for adults. In this course, we will look at some of the best-known tales that exist in multiple versions, and represent shifting views of gender, race, class, and nationality over time. The course will emphasize the environmental vision of fairy tales, in particular, the uses of natural magic, wilderness adventures, animal transformations, and encounters with other-than-human characters.

Selections from The Canterbury Tales and other works by the greatest English writer before Shakespeare. In studying Chaucer's medieval masterpiece, students will encounter a variety of tales and tellers, with subject matter that ranges from broad and bawdy humour through subtle social satire to moral fable.
Pre-1900 course

A study of selected medieval texts by one or more authors.
Pre-1900 course

Long before the travel channel, medieval writers described exciting journeys through lands both real and imagined. This course covers authors ranging from scholar Ibn Battuta, whose pilgrimage to Mecca became the first step in a twenty-year journey across India, Southeast Asia, and China; to armchair traveller John Mandeville, who imagines distant lands filled with monsters and marvels. We will consider issues such as: how travel writing negotiates cultural difference; how it maps space and time; and how it represents wonders and marvels. Students will also have the opportunity to experiment with creative responses such as writing their own travelogues.

Pre-1900 course.

A study of the poetry, prose, and drama written in England between the death of Queen Elizabeth in 1603 and the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660. This course will examine the innovative literature of these politically tumultuous years alongside debates concerning personal and political sovereignty, religion, censorship, ethnicity, courtship and marriage, and women's authorship.
Pre-1900 course

A focused exploration of women's writing in the early modern period. This course considers the variety of texts produced by women (including closet drama, religious and secular poetry, diaries, letters, prose romance, translations, polemical tracts, and confessions), the contexts that shaped those writings, and the theoretical questions with which they engage.
Pre-1900 course

A study of the real and imagined multiculturalism of early modern English life. How did English encounters and exchanges with people, products, languages, and material culture from around the globe redefine ideas of national, ethnic, and racial community? In exploring this question, we will consider drama and poetry together with travel writing, language manuals for learning foreign tongues, costume books, and maps.
Pre-1900 course

Studies in literature and literary culture during a turbulent era that was marked by extraordinary cultural ferment and literary experimentation. During this period satire and polemic flourished, Milton wrote his great epic, Behn her brilliant comedies, Swift his bitter attacks, and Pope his technically balanced but often viciously biased poetry.
Pre-1900 course

An exploration of literature and literary culture during the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries. We will trace the development of a consciously national culture, and birth of the concepts of high, middle, and low cultures. Authors may include Johnson, Boswell, Burney, Sheridan, Yearsley, Blake, and Wordsworth.
Pre-1900 course

An examination of generic experimentation that began during the English Civil Wars and led to the novel. We will address such authors as Aphra Behn and Daniel Defoe, alongside news, ballads, and scandal sheets: and look at the book trade, censorship, and the growth of the popular press.
Pre-1900 course

A contextual study of the first fictions that contemporaries recognized as being the novel. We will examine the novel in relation to its readers, to neighbouring genres such as letters, nonfiction travel writing, and conduct manuals, and to culture more generally. Authors might include Richardson, Fielding, Sterne, Burney, Austen and others.
Pre-1900 course

From Augustine’s Confessions to Dante’s New Life, medieval writers developed creative means of telling their life stories. This course tracks medieval life-writing from Augustine and Dante to later figures such as Margery Kempe—beer brewer, mother of fourteen, and self-proclaimed saint—Thomas Hoccleve, author of the first description of a mental breakdown in English literature, and Christian convert to Islam Anselmo Turmeda/‘Abd Allāh al-Turjumān. In these texts, life writing is used for everything from establishing a reputation to recovering from trauma to religious polemic. The course will also explore how medieval life writing can help us to understand 21st century practices of self-representation, from selfies to social media.

Pre-1900 course.

In what ways can video games be “read” and assessed as storytelling texts? And how do those video game narratives reflect historical, cultural, and social concerns? Students will explore game narratives by learning about critical and structural approaches, but also through personal reflective practices. Although active playing will be a required part of the course, all video game experience levels are welcome.

A study of the Romantic Movement in European literature, 1750-1850. This course investigates the cultural and historical origins of the Romantic Movement, its complex definitions and varieties of expression, and the responses it provoked in the wider culture. Examination of representative authors such as Goethe, Rousseau, Wollstonecraft, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, P. B. Shelley, Keats, Byron and M. Shelley will be combined with study of the philosophical and historical backgrounds of Romanticism.
Pre-1900 course

An investigation of how nineteenth-century literature is translated into our contemporary world through art forms like music, architecture, film, television, graphic novels, or online and social media. What is it that makes us keep returning to the past, and how does each adaptation re-make the original into something new and relevant?
Pre-1900 course.

This course focuses on queer studies in a transhistorical context. It serves as an introduction to queer theory and culture, putting queer theory into conversation with a range of literary texts as well as other forms of media and culture. This course might explore contemporary LGBTQ2+ literature, media and popular culture; the history of queer theory; and literary work from early periods to recover queer literary histories.

An examination of how the law and legal practices have been imagined in literature, including the foundations of law, state constitutions, rule of law, rights, trials and judgments, ideas of justice, natural law, enforcement, and punishment. We will examine Western and non-Western experiences of the law, legal documents and works of literature. Authors may include Sophocles, Aeschylus, Shakespeare, Melville, Dostoyevsky, Kafka, Achebe, Soyinka, Borges, Shamsie, R. Wright, Silko.

A study of poetry written roughly between the World Wars. Poets from several nations may be considered. Topics to be treated include Modernist difficulty, formal experimentation, and the politics of verse. Literary traditions from which Modernist poets drew will be discussed, as will the influence of Modernism on postmodern writing.

An investigation of the literatures and theories of the unthinkable, the reformist, the iconoclastic, and the provocative. Satire can be conservative or subversive, corrective or anarchic. This course will address a range of satire and its theories. Writers range from Juvenal, Horace, Lucian, Erasmus, Donne, Jonson, Rochester, Dryden, Swift, Pope, Gay, Haywood, and Behn to Pynchon, Nabokov and Atwood.
Pre-1900 course

This course explores social media’s influence on literary culture and our personal lives. Engaging with contemporary novels, essays and films that deal with the social media, as well as examining social media content itself (from early web blogs, to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and TikTok), over the course of the semester, we will consider how social media shapes literary texts and our emotional, social and political selves.

Developments in American fiction from the end of the 1950's to the present: the period that produced James Baldwin, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, John Updike, Norman Mailer, Ann Beatty, Raymond Carver, Don DeLillo, Toni Morrison, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Leslie Marmon Silko, among others.

A study of Arab women writers from the late nineteenth century to the present. Their novels, short stories, essays, poems, and memoirs invite us to rethink western perceptions of Arab women. Issues of gender, religion, class, nationalism, and colonialism will be examined from the perspective of Arab women from both the Arab world and North America.

An analysis of how gender and the content and structure of poetry, prose, and drama inform each other. Taking as its starting point Virginia Woolf's claim that the novel was the genre most accessible to women because it was not entirely formed, this course will consider how women writers across historical periods and cultural contexts have contributed to specific literary genres and how a consideration of gender impacts our interpretation of literary texts.

This course introduces students to ecocriticism (the study of the relationship between literature and environment). The course is loosely structured around several topics: the environmental imagination in literature and film, ecological literary theory, the history of the environmental movement and climate activism, literary representations of natural and unnatural disasters, and climate fiction.

A study of plays by Indigenous authors (primarily Canadian), from Turtle Island, paying attention to relations between text and performance, and with an emphasis on distinctive themes that emerge, including colonialism, Indigenous resistance, and Indigenous sovereignty.

Indigenous literatures of Turtle Island course

A study of poetry by Indigenous authors (primarily Canadian) from Turtle Island. Discussion will focus on the ways poetic form and content combine to achieve meaning and open up new strategies for thinking critically, and with an emphasis on distinctive themes that emerge, including colonialism, Indigenous resistance, and Indigenous sovereignty.

Indigenous literatures of Turtle Island course

A study of short stories by Indigenous authors (primarily Canadian) from Turtle Island, examining narrative techniques, thematic concerns, and innovations, and with an emphasis on distinctive themes that emerge, including colonialism, Indigenous resistance, and Indigenous sovereignty.

Indigenous literatures of Turtle Island course