The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were times of unprecedented change to economic, cultural and political structures in Europe and America. Marx’s theories of class struggle, Freud’s theories of the unconscious, Darwin’s theories of evolution, and Einstein’s theory of relativity all made the world a more complicated place. Women’s demands for suffrage threatened order in the home; the invention of the airplane made the world seem smaller; and the x-ray exposed the body under the skin. Many writers of the time felt that the literary techniques of the nineteenth century, particularly literary realism, were no longer capable of responding to the changes in society. They engaged with this sense of transformation by rallying to Ezra Pound’s call to ‘make it new’, and experimented with new ways of telling stories, new ways of presenting characters, new ways of representing life, and new ways of changing the world.

While the traditional story of modernism is set in London, Paris, and New York, this version of events downplays the extent to which the modernism of Europe and America depended on immigrants and non-European art forms. It also ignores the innovations that were taking place in the rest of the world. This paper explores the traditional story of modernism, but also turns to exciting new development in global and transnational modernisms, and looks at the ways writers in countries such as Sudan, the Caribbean, Fiji, and New Zealand responded to the conditions of their modernity. We will move across time and space between writers such as Virginia Woolf and Tayeb Salih, Katherine Mansfield and Subramani.

This paper consists of two lectures (Tuesday and Thursday) and a one-hour workshop that follows the Tuesday lecture. While the workshop will prioritise small group discussion and analysis of the texts, the lectures will also involve some participation and discussion. Attendance is expected at all lectures and workshops.

Please organise your study to ensure that you come to the lectures having read the novels and theoretical texts being addressed - your ability to follow the lecture and ask any questions needed will greatly increase if you do. The short quizzes, which are due just before we start each novel, are designed to help you check your basic comprehension of the texts, and getting them right can make a really positive difference to your grade! The short writing assignments are there to ensure that you develop your writing skills, and refine your reactions to the texts and critical positions.

All course information, assessment information, lecture slides, and relevant links/materials will be available through Moodle.

All work must use proper referencing and include a full bibliography of works cited. The English Programme at Waikato prefers students to use MHRA (footnotes) or MLA (in-text) referencing systems. If you chose to use MLA, please ensure that you include page numbers.

A full MHRA style guide can be downloaded for free from the MHRA website (www.mhra.org.uk/Publications/Books/StyleGuide/).

Detailed and reliable information about MLA is available online through Purdue’s Online Writing Lab (https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/section/2/11/).

There is an online Moodle community for this course. Moodle can be accessed via iWaikato. Assignment details, important dates and the paper outline are all available from this site. Lecture slides will be posted to Moodle at the end of each topic.

This paper has an expected workload of 150 hours.