540A: Four Modernists: D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, and T. S. Eliot

This course uses close readings of works by four important figures in early twentieth-century Britain in order to explore the development of British modernism in the first three decades of the century. It will address several related issues: the conflicted history of modernist canon formation, the significance of personal relationships and literary coteries in literary production, and the influence of psychoanalysis and new sexual theories on writers of this period.

Texts: D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love; Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse; Katherine Mansfield's Selected Stories; T. S. Eliot, Selected Prose, and The Waste Land and Other Poems.