This course provides an intensive study of how the writers of influential nineteenth-century British literary texts (including short and long poems, a novella, novels, and prose non-fiction) chose to portray the intersection of religious faith and gender. This course not only familiarizes students with the most significant nineteenth-century British authors, but also enables a thorough exploration of two of the most prevalent areas of debate in the nineteenth century: gender roles and questions of faith.

Examines (auto)biographies as literary artifacts, responses to culture, and as texts within which identity is shaped and altered by the intentional acts of their writers. Examines current theories of (auto)biography by including life studies written by individuals whose association with the literary order has its origins in intellectual and cultural spheres. Explores how life writing participates in the construction of identity and engages subjectivity as a narrative strategy. Theorists including Paul Ricoeur, George Steiner, Richard Kearney, and Eva Hoffman are foundational to this study.

The study of the literary expression of religious desire, doubt, and despair in early-modern British literature. The aesthetic shaping of spiritual belief and sentiment within specific historical and cultural contexts is investigated in a selection of early-modern works, including those by Anne Vaughan Lock, Robert Southwell, George Herbert, John Donne, Elizabeth Melville, Henry Vaughan, Richard Crashaw, An Collins, Thomas Traherne, John Bunyan, George Fox, and Margaret Fell Fox.

Under the direction of a supervisor, students not writing a thesis will research and write a major paper of approximately 10,000-15,000 words in length.

Under the direction of the student's approved thesis or major research paper advisor, a course of reading and study which leads to the development of both a significant bibliographical essay (or annotated bibliography) and a thesis proposal. The latter includes at least the following: major question(s) to be addressed; significance of the issue(s); methodologies to be used; theories to be addressed and primary sources to be examined.

Topics may vary.

Designed to orient students to the crucial transition from modernist to postmodernist and post-postmodernist models of texts and interpretation, models that depend on changing philosophical views of truth and reality. It examines the main interpretive paradigms in literary studies in order to show how views of reason, language, and textuality continue to shape one's life horizons.

Examines the long history of fantasy texts by first locating works of George MacDonald, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Madeleine L'Engle within the Anglo-Saxon epic and the Medieval romance literary traditions in English literature, including Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The course also considers how these works have shaped the imagination of creators of modern fantasy as well as the argument that modern fantasy is a response to post-Enlightenment rationalism.