Παρουσίαση/Προβολή

(ENL156) -  Anna Despotopoulou

Περιγραφή Μαθήματος

Fall 2025-26

Thursday 12:00-15:00 (room 823) Classes will start on Thursday 9/10/25 (not on the 2nd of October)

Check out the syllabus in the Introduction course unit for details

 

“Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged,” wrote Virginia Woolf in her essay “Modern Fiction” (1921). Early twentieth-century Modernist writers produced literature that reflects Woolf’s insight, breaking with earlier literary form and subject matter. Our course will concentrate on some of the most innovative works of English Modernism, studied within the historical, cultural, social, and scientific framework of the first part of the twentieth century. We will consider issues of nation, gender, sexuality, war, mental health, urban life, and empire.

Required Texts (available online—check e-class for documents and links)

Novels: James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (chapter 1 only), Virginia Woolf,  Mrs. Dalloway, Jean Rhys, Voyage in the Dark

Short Stories: James Joyce, “The Dead”, Katherine Mansfield, “The Lost Battle,” Virginia Woolf, Lappin and Lapinova," E. M. Forster, “The Story of a Panic,” Elizabeth Bowen, “Salon des Dames”, Ford Madox Ford, "Pink Flannel"

Essays:  T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent”, Virginia Woolf, “Modern Fiction” and “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown”, Georg Simmel, "The Metropolis and Mental Life"

Image: The Red Room (also Harmony in Red) (1908), Henri Matisse 

Anna Despotopoulou  is Professor in English Literature and Culture and has been teaching in the Department of English Language and Literature since 2002. She holds degrees in English Studies from the University of Athens (BA), the University of Oxford (M.Phil.), and the University of Reading (Ph.D.). Her research interests lie in Victorian, Modernist, and contemporary fiction, Henry James, and feminist theory. She teaches 19th -21st century English fiction. She is the author of Women and the Railway, 1850-1915 (Edinburgh University Press, 2015). She has co-edited the books Hotel Modernisms (Routledge, 2023), Victorians and Modern Greece (Routledge, 2025) Ruins in the Literary and Cultural Imagination (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), Henry James and The Supernatural (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), Transforming Henry James (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013), as well as the third issue of the e-journal Synthesis on Realism. She has published many articles on Henry James, Jane Austen, Joseph Conrad, Christina Rossetti, George Eliot, and Rhoda Broughton, among others, in internationally published books and academic journals. She was the principal investigator of the research project Hotels and the Modern Subject 1890-1940 (HOTEMS) (2019-2023) and also participated in the research project Representations of Modern Greece in Victorian Popular Culture (REVICTO), both funded by the Hellenic Foundation for Research and Innovation. In 2023 she is the President of the Henry James Society.

Ημερομηνία δημιουργίας

Παρασκευή 10 Σεπτεμβρίου 2010