Course Co-ordinator: Prof Cairns Craig

Pre-requisite(s): Available only to registered postgraduate students

The course explores the development in Ireland and Scotland of kinds of literature which came to be typical of the movement now classed as 'Modernism'. Starting from Robert Louis Stevenson in Scotland and W.B. Yeats in Ireland, it traces the changing nature of art and its relationship to nationality. The development of the new modes of writing related to the increasing specialisation of reading publics is explored and the ways in which writers attempt through their writings to construct alternative versions of the nation. The course will plot the mutual influence of writers from the two countries - the shared development of 'Celticism', the general influence of the Irish Revival movement on the emergence of the 'Scottish Renaissance', the influence of J.G. Frazer's the Golden Bough on writers in both countries - and the ways in which they stimulate each other to distinctive experiments in style and form.

1 x 2-hour seminar weekly + 6x 1-hour training sessions.

Essay, 5000 words (80%); presentation (20%).