HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH LITERATURE
1. Early forms of Old English writing; Anglo-Saxon religious poetry; medieval romances; courtly
love and chivalry.
2. The Canterbury Tales as an encyclopaedia of literary genres (fabliau, exemplum, saint’s life, fable,
verse romance, folk tale) and a microcosm of the English medieval society - low culture and high
culture
3. Renaissance Drama: Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare.
4. The rise of the novel – reasons for the appearance of a new genre, early forms of novels
(picaresque, epistolary, satire).
5. Romantic idea of poetry and its role.
6. Victorian Novel - the social aspect of the novel; representation of Victorian society, recurrent
themes of Victorian literature (Charles Dickens: Great Expectations, Emily Brontë: Wuthering
Heights)
7. Narrative experiments in the 20th century – Joyce, Woolf, T.S. Elliot.
HISTORY OF AMERICAN LITERATURE
1. Puritan Literature (17th c.)
2. Enlightenment literature (18th c.)
3. American Transcendentalism (19th c)
4. American realism and naturalism (end of 19th c)
5. Modernist fiction (20th c)