This course surveys British and Irish literature from the early 1800s to the present, including the Romantic Period, the Victorian Era, and the rise of Modernism. Students will focus on major works of poetry by authors like Wordsworth, Coleridge, Tennyson, and Moore, and important novels by Austen, Dickens, Eliot, and Woolf. Lectures and discussion will concentrate on how these writings respond to seminal events in their time ranging from the Industrial Revolution to the Reform Bills to the first World War.