Postgraduate Course: An English Heritage: Nativism, Language and History in the Work of Four Post-war Poets (ENLI11156)
Course Outline
| School | School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures |
College | College of Humanities and Social Science |
| Credit level (Normal year taken) | SCQF Level 11 (Postgraduate) |
Availability | Available to all students |
| SCQF Credits | 20 |
ECTS Credits | 10 |
| Summary | This course will explore the work of four post-war English poets in relation to their shared concerns both with Englishness and with arguments concerning the nature of English poetic tradition. It will focus on works from the oeuvres of the four poets in which these issues are raised as matters of style, prosody and theme, and will also, where appropriate, address those works through the critical and other controversies to which they have given rise. Of consistent interest will be the ways in which this poetry is situated in relation to the challenge and legacies of international modernism, and how in the light of this relation it tackles the issue of a 'native' tradition in English poetry. This concern will be informed in turn by two further significant questions: firstly, the importance that ought to be accorded to the non-metropolitan status of this poetry, and a related interest in non-standard Englishes; secondly, the relevance for this poetry of postwar political and cultural disputes regarding the writing of English history.
*This course is taught jointly with undergraduate students and consequently postgraduate places are limited |
| Course description |
Week 1 Introduction; ¿Nativism¿ in an English context.
Week 2 Philip Larkin, selected poems and prose
Week 3 Philip Larkin, selected poems and prose
Week 4 Basil Bunting, selected poems
Week 5 Basil Bunting, Briggflatts
Week 6 Geoffrey Hill, selected poems and prose
Week 7 Geoffrey Hill, selected poems and prose
Week 8 Geoffrey Hill, Canaan
Week 9 Tony Harrison, ¿The School of Eloquence¿
Week 10 Tony Harrison, V
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Entry Requirements (not applicable to Visiting Students)
| Pre-requisites |
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Co-requisites | |
| Prohibited Combinations | |
Other requirements | None |
Information for Visiting Students
| Pre-requisites | None |
Course Delivery Information
| Not being delivered |
Learning Outcomes
By the end of this course students will be able to:
- demonstrate a good knowledge of the work of the four poets;
- comment knowledgeably on the style and prosodic details of the poetry studied;
- show an awareness of relevant critical controversies surrounding some of these bodies of work;
- demonstrate a familiarity with relevant aspects of the postwar 'English question'
- assess the significance of dialect or non-standard English for this poetry's engagement with the issues
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Reading List
Primary Texts:
Basil Bunting, Complete Poems (2000)
Philip Larkin, Collected Poems (2003)
Geoffrey Hill, Selected Poems (Penguin 2006)
Tony Harrison, Selected Poems (1995)
Secondary Reading:
Basil Bunting, Basil Bunting on Poetry (2000)
Philip Larkin, Required Writing (1983)
Geoffrey Hill, The Lords of Limit (1984)
Geoffrey Hill, The Enemy¿s Country (1991)
Robert Colls, Identity of England (2002)
Krishan Kumar, The Making of English National Identity (2003)
Dave Russell, Looking North: Northern England and the National Imagination (2004)
Seamus Heaney, Preoccupations (1980)
Randall Stevenson, The Oxford English Literary History vol 12: The Last of England? (2004)
Andrew Roberts, Geoffrey Hill (2004)
Laurence Lerner, Philip Larkin (2003)
Joe Kelleher, Tony Harrison (1996)
Julian Stannard, Basil Bunting (2004)
John Osborne, Radical Larkin and his Conservative Commentators (2005)
James McGonigal and Richard Price, eds, The Star You Steer by: Basil Bunting and British Modernism (2000)
Peter Quartermain, Basil Bunting: Poet of the North (1990)
Victoria Forde, The Poetry of Basil Bunting (1997)
James Booth, ed., New Larkins for Old (2002)
Andrew Swarbrick, Out of Reach: the Poetry of Philip Larkin (1995)
Stephen Regan, ed., Philip Larkin (1997)
Jeffrey Wainwright, Acceptable Words: Essays on the Poetry of Geoffrey Hill (2205)
Peter Robinson, ed., Geoffrey Hill: Essays on His Work (1985)
Vincent Sherry, The Uncommon Tongue: the Poetry and Criticism of Geoffrey Hill (1987)
Avril Horner, Geoffrey Hill: English Modernist or Postmodern European? (1994)
Neil Astley, ed., Tony Harrison (1997)
Sandie Byrne, H, V. and O: the Poetry of Tony Harrison (1998)
Antony Rowland, Mourning and Annihilation in Tony Harrison¿s ¿School of Eloquence¿ Sequence (1996)
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Additional Information
| Graduate Attributes and Skills |
Not entered |
| Special Arrangements |
PG Version of ENLI10239 |
| Keywords | AEH |
Contacts
| Course organiser | Prof James Loxley
Tel: (0131 6)50 3610
Email: James.Loxley@ed.ac.uk |
Course secretary | Miss Natalie Carthy
Tel: (0131 6)50 6536
Email: Natalie.Carthy@ed.ac.uk |
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