| Detailed Course Description: The profound transformation of the English novel since 1900 has been influenced by a variety of psycho-social, historical/political, and artistic forces, including, but not limited to, the emergence of modern psychology and visual arts, colonization, the decline and fall of empire, women’s suffrage, two catastrophic world wars, and what Caribbean poet Louise Bennett calls “colonization in reverse,” the migration of former colonials to what was once the “motherland.” Early in the century, English novelists, such as Virginia Woolf, experimented with form and content, rejecting the nineteenth-century classic realist text, embracing a form that endeavored to reveal the chaos of inner consciousness. Later in the century, some British novelists, such as A.S. Byatt and Ian McEwan, questioned the aims of High Modernist writing and emphasized a return to “traditional” storytelling.
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