L0852 - ENGLISH LITERATURE B I

The first section of the course is devoted to early seventeenth-century English theatre, a period of extraordinary dramatic vitality in which comedy and tragedy developed in parallel as complementary tools for exploring the same human material: greed, ambition, manipulation, and their effects on social and family relationships. The syllabus sets two comedies by Ben Jonson, Volpone and The Alchemist, against two tragedies by William Shakespeare, Othello and Macbeth, to show how the same vice — the desire for money or power — can produce opposite outcomes depending on the genre the author chooses: corrective punishment and the restoration of social order in Jonson's comedy, irreversible ruin and moral catastrophe in Shakespeare's tragedy. The purpose of this section is not simply to present four foundational texts of Jacobean drama, but to bring out, through direct comparison, the different rhetorical, structural, and moral strategies with which English literature of this period confronts human fragility in the face of desire.

The second section of the course is devoted to the nineteenth-century English novel, the genre that during this period established itself as the dominant narrative form and a privileged means of exploring the individual's relationship with society, family, and the historical context in which they live.
The syllabus opens with Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice (1813), which, through irony and acute social observation, presents marriage as a social and economic institution while also exploring the pursuit of female moral autonomy within a rigid social framework. It then turns to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818), a Gothic and proto-science-fiction novel that questions the limits of scientific knowledge, the responsibilities involved in creation, and what it means to be perceived as "monstrous" by society. The section concludes with Charles Dickens's Great Expectations (1860–61), which broadens the perspective to Victorian society as a whole, addressing issues of class, ambition, and the protagonist's moral development through a wide-ranging social panorama.
The purpose of this section is to illustrate the evolution and diversity of the nineteenth-century English novel—from the novel of manners, to speculative Gothic fiction, to the socially grounded Bildungsroman—while highlighting how, despite their different genres and registers, all three works share a critical engagement with social conventions and the constraints imposed on individuals by their social context.