Module overview
What does it mean to make literature new? How do we describe writing now? In this module you will explore the transformations, revolutions, and innovations that have taken place in literature in English when writers have grappled with these questions across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. You begin by considering how the immense social, political and technological changes of the last century inflected how writers figured the workings of minds, bodies, and urban ecologies. As you move towards the present day, you’ll explore writing about the city, the literature of revolutions, techniques for representing everyday life, and the blurry boundaries between fiction and autobiography. You will learn how new social contexts and political identities exploded literary forms, how writing communities responded to transformations in human relationships and their environments, and how the legacies of modernist experiment are still shaping writing today. And in your critical essays, you will acquire the skills to write about complex literary forms and to analyse your own contemporary moment.