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“Only connect!” proclaimed E. M. Forster in his 1910 novel Howard’s End, hinting at a possible solution to some of the pressing social and aesthetic problems of the era.  “Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height.  Life in fragments no longer.”  Sadly, the optimism represented by Forster’s words was soon shattered by the onset of World War I that literally and figuratively fragmented people’s experiences and physical realities.  While we may not achieve exaltation, our course will endeavour to connect fragments of literature and other cultural productions from the beginning of the First World War to the end of the Second World War.

The period spanning the two world wars was characterized by a fading of the optimism that had buoyed the British people throughout much of the second half of the nineteenth century.  As Europe struggled with the collective trauma of the First World War, the sense that many of the foundations of British culture were fragmenting or in danger of collapse marked the literature and other cultural products of the period with a sense of desolation. But the period was also one of literary and artistic innovation of theme, form, content, and mode.  Focusing primarily on British literature, with possible forays into European and North American literature, our course will explore the development of literary modernism in the first half of the twentieth century.  While most of our work will be concerned with prose fiction and non fiction by such writers as Ford Madox Ford, Virginia Woolf, Rebecca West, Djuna Barnes, James Joyce, Jean Rhys, and Katherine Mansfield, poetry may also feature on the course, and we will also consider the relationships between literary and visual arts in this multi-disciplinary movement.