Classics of British literature

Part 1. lecture 1. Anglo-Saxon roots

Pessimism and comradeship

lecture 2. Chaucer

Social diversity

lecture 3. Chaucer

a man of unusual cultivation

lecture 4. Spense

The faerie queene

lecture 5. Early drama

Low comedy and religion

lecture 6. Marlowe

controversy and danger

lecture 7. Shakespeare the man

The road to the globe

lecture 8. Shakespeare

the mature years

lecture 9. Shakespeare's rivals

Jonson and Webster

lecture 10. The King James Bible

English most elegant

lecture 11. The metaphysicals

conceptual daring

lecture 12. Paradise lost

a new language for poetry.

Part 2. lecture 13. Turmoil makes for good literature

lecture 14. The Augustans

order, decorum, and wit

lecture 15. Swift

anger and satire

lecture 16. Johnson

bringing order to the language

lecture 17. Defoe

Crusoe and the rise of capitalism

lecture 18. Behn

emancipation in the Restoration

lecture 19. The golden age of fiction

lecture 20. Gibbon

window into 18th-century England

lecture 21. Equiano

the inhumanity of slavery

lecture 22. Women poets

the minor voice

lecture 23. Wollstonecraft

"First of a new genus"

lecture 24. Blake

mythic universes and poetry.

Part 3. lecture 25. Scott and Burns

the voices of Scotland

lecture 26. Lyrical ballads

collaborative creation

lecture 27. Mad, bad Byron

lecture 28. Keats

literary gold

lecture 29. Frankenstein

a Gothic masterpiece

lecture 30. Miss Austen and Mrs Radcliffe

lecture 31. Pride and prejudice

moral fiction

lecture 32. Dickens

writer with a mission

lecture 33. The 1840s

growth of the realistic novel

lecture 34. Wuthering Heights

Emily's masterwork

lecture 35. Jane Eyre and the other Brontë

lecture 36. Voices of Victorian poetry.

Part 4. lecture 37. Eliot

fiction and moral reflection

lecture 38. Hardy

life at its worst

lecture 39. The British bestseller

an overview

lecture 40. Heart of darkness

heart of the empire?

lecture 41. Wilde

celebrity author

lecture 42. Shaw and Pygmalion

lecture 43. Joyce and Yeats

giants of Irish literature

lecture 44. Great war, great poetry

lecture 45. Bloomsbury and the Bloomsberries

lecture 46. 20th century English poetry

two traditions

lecture 47. British fiction from James to Rushdie

lecture 48. New theatre, new literary worlds.