Unit rationale, description and aim

This unit covers major literary works from the late eighteenth century to the present, organised through four literary periods and movements: Romanticism, the nineteenth century, modernism and postmodernism. Students engage deeply with individual works while attending to aesthetic breaks and continuities across the unit’s chronological span. Particular attention is given to the different valuations and practices of realism and of innovation within and between periods.

The unit aims to trace the characteristic features and historical development of literature across these four periods and movements through close analysis of representative texts. Students will develop their capacity to analyse and critique diverse works within the western literary tradition and to understand the complex lineage of aspects of contemporary literature and culture.

2026 10

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  • Term Mode
  • Semester 2Campus Attendance

Prerequisites

WLIT200 Medieval and Renaissance Masterpieces: the Rise of the English Literary Tradition OR WLIT201 The Age of the Novel: 1600-1900

Learning outcomes

To successfully complete this unit you will be able to demonstrate you have achieved the learning outcomes (LO) detailed in the below table.

Each outcome is informed by a number of graduate capabilities (GC) to ensure your work in this, and every unit, is part of a larger goal of graduating from ACU with the attributes of insight, empathy, imagination and impact.

Explore the graduate capabilities.

Identify key aspects of great Romantic, nineteenth...

Learning Outcome 01

Identify key aspects of great Romantic, nineteenth-century, modernist and postmodernist works of the western literary canon
Relevant Graduate Capabilities: GC1, GC3, GC7, GC9

Analyse literary, social, historical, aesthetic or...

Learning Outcome 02

Analyse literary, social, historical, aesthetic or ethical ideas and movements relevant to texts drawn from these periods through an independently-formulated research task
Relevant Graduate Capabilities: GC1, GC3, GC7, GC9, GC11, GC12

Evaluate knowledge from diverse sources and commun...

Learning Outcome 03

Evaluate knowledge from diverse sources and communicate complex ideas and findings with sophistication and confidence to a range of audiences
Relevant Graduate Capabilities: GC1, GC3, GC7, GC9, GC11, GC12

Compose intellectually-grounded and informed judgm...

Learning Outcome 04

Compose intellectually-grounded and informed judgments about literary and aesthetics movements and their interactions
Relevant Graduate Capabilities: GC1, GC3, GC7, GC9

Content

Topics may include: 

  • Comparative Romanticisms: German, English, French, etc.
  • Global literary responses to the French Revolution
  • The ‘Preface’ to Lyrical Ballads and the genre of poetic manifestos
  • The dialectic of ‘imagination’ and ‘realism’ in the nineteenth-century novel (e.g. Madame Bovary, Hard Times, Middlemarch)
  • The interplay of social criticism and psychological drama in Ibsen, Chekhov, Shaw
  • World War I and its impact on modern poetry, fiction, and film
  • Modernist ‘epics’ (Ulysses, The Magic Mountain, In Search of Lost Time) and modernist ‘fragments’ (The Waste Land, Kafka)
  • Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, women’s modernisms, and the construction of women’s literary history
  • Race in American modernism and postmodernism (e.g. Faulkner, Hurston, Ellison, Hughes, Morrison, Roth)
  • Postmodernist fictions (e.g. Ficciones, The Crying of Lot 49, Infinite Jest, White Teeth)
  • Parody and play in relation to the literary past (e.g. Top Girls, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead)

Assessment strategy and rationale

A range of assessment procedures will be used to meet the unit learning outcomes and develop graduate attributes consistent with the University's assessment requirements. Assessments have been developed to meet the unit learning outcomes and develop graduate attributes consistent with the University's assessment requirements. These have been designed so that they use a variety of tasks to measure the different learning outcomes at a level suitable for third-year studies of Western Civilisation. The research project has two stages that require students to propose and complete a study of one Romantic or nineteenth-century work, analysing its literary form and techniques. The study will address the work within its cultural and historical context and in light of contemporary scholarship.

The exam is summative and requires students to demonstrate a comprehensive understanding of literary works and styles over the periods in question, with a substantial focus on modernism and postmodernism. This in-class,  secure assessment will comprise shorter questions covering course content and concepts, and essay prompts inviting analyses of texts in terms of overlaps and interactions among literary periods and movements.

Overview of assessments

Assessment 1: Part A- Research Proposal This pro...

Assessment 1: Part A- Research Proposal

This proposal requires students to outline the argument and sources to be used in the research project.

Weighting

10%

Learning Outcomes LO1, LO2, LO3
Graduate Capabilities GC1, GC3, GC7, GC9, GC11, GC12

Assessment 1: Part B- Research Project This essa...

Assessment 1: Part B- Research Project

This essay requires students to interpret a Romantic or nineteenth-century literary work or works, relating them to relevant contexts.

Weighting

40%

Learning Outcomes LO1, LO2, LO3
Graduate Capabilities GC1, GC3, GC7, GC9, GC11, GC12

Assessment 2: Exam This assessment requires stud...

Assessment 2: Exam

This assessment requires students to analyse texts and to be able to analyse how features of Romantic, nineteenth-century, modernist and postmodernist literature overlap in particular texts or cultural moments.

Weighting

50%

Learning Outcomes LO1, LO3, LO4
Graduate Capabilities GC1, GC3, GC7, GC9, GC11, GC12

Learning and teaching strategy and rationale

Students will gain familiarity with literary movements through class discussion in a small group setting, in which the texts and thematic concerns of the unit can be considered and debated in a supportive and inclusive manner. The small group setting will facilitate the use of the ‘Socratic’ method, in which analytical discussion and dialogue are stimulated through an engaging question-and-answer format to consider texts and ideas from the Romantic, nineteenth-century, modernist and postmodernist periods.

In this context, students will:

  1. Acquire knowledge of the Romantic, nineteenth-century, modernist and postmodernist periods, including social contexts, significant authors and works. Debates concerning the definitions of all four movements will be covered early and returned to throughout the unit.
  2. Hone close reading skills to generate deeper levels of analysis. This will involve discussions aimed at articulating complex meanings and structures and a sophisticated grasp of the relationships between texts and eras. Students gain skills in recognising the movement the text belongs to.
  3. Synthesise content knowledge and close reading skills to build interpretations in relation to relevant contexts. This ability to relate meaning to context will be developed through discussion of case studies.

Representative texts and references

Representative texts and references

Burwick, Frederick. A History of Romantic Literature. Blackwell History of Literature. Hoboken: New JerseyWiley-Blackwell, 2019. 

Chandler, James, and Maureen N. McLane, eds. The Cambridge Companion to British Romantic Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 

Churchill, Caryl. Top Girls. London: Methuen, 2008. 

Duffy, Cian. The Cambridge Companion to the Romantic Sublime. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023. 

Eliot, T. S. The Waste Land and Other Poems. London: Faber and Faber, 1972. 

Gaggi, Silvio. Modern/Postmodern: A Study in Twentieth-Century Arts and Ideas. Penn Studies in Contemporary American Fiction. Philadelphia, Pa.: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. 

Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms. Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2000.Henry, Casey Michael. New Media and the Transformation of Postmodern American Literature: From Cage to Connection. New Horizons in Contemporary Writing. 2019. 

Levenson, Michael H., ed. and ProQuest. The Cambridge Companion to Modernism. 2nd ed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. 

McHale, Brian. Postmodernist Fictions. New York: Routledge, 1987.Miguel-Alfonso. The Fictional Minds of Modernism: Narrative Cognition from Henry James to Christopher Isherwood. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. 

Moi, Toril. Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism: Art, Theater, Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. 

O'Neill, Michael, and Madeleine. Callaghan. The Romantic Poetry Handbook. 1st ed. Wiley Blackwell Literature Handbooks. Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell, 2018. 

Rodensky, Lisa, ed. The Oxford Handbook of the Victorian Novel. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. 

Stephan, Matthias. Defining Literary Postmodernism for the Twenty-first Century. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. 

Wordsworth, William and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Lyrical Ballads: 1798 and 1802. Ed. Fiona Stafford. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. 

Locations
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