The majority of this survey course will be devoted to introducing Romantic, Victorian, and Modern poetry. Historically, the course begins in the Age of Revolution, and we will study some of the poetry and prose inspired by the American and (especially) the French Revolution and Revolutionary Wars. In this phase we will read  narrative poems by William Blake and Anna Letitia Barbauld and some political prose. We will read one nineteenth- and one twentieth-century novel, studying the development of realism and then avant-garde Modernism in reaction against the Romantic legacy. Our novelists may include Jane Austen, Elizabeth Gaskell, Arthur Conan Doyle, and/or Virginia Woolf, among others. We will read plays by Oscar Wilde and Samuel Beckett and will engage closely with John Keats, Christina Rossetti, and Gerard Manley Hopkins, among other poets, touching briefly on numerous others. There will be a strong emphasis on poetic form and interpretation in both exams and papers. Final grades are based partly on these and partly on informal student reading journals and class participation. The last two weeks of the course will be devoted to postcolonial London, most likely focused through a reading of Zadie Smith’s novel NW (2012).