This course explores a number of radical twentieth-century literary texts in various genres, written in or translated into English, each of which is an attempt to challenge and re-invent more traditional forms and modes of writing. These modernist texts, and their inter-relationship, will be considered under the rubric of “world literature”. The course will also look at some of the themes -such as empire and nation, the nature of the artist, the bourgeois experience, the city, and changing understandings of gender, race, sexuality and the foreign - that shaped modernity in the modernist century.

a selection of radical twentieth-century literary texts in various genres

empire and nation, the nature of the artist, the bourgeois experience, the city, and changing understandings of gender, race, sexuality and the foreign