This course engages with British poetry, drama, and prose from the “Augustan Age” through the early Romantic period. Topics may include the flourishing of print culture; satirical and sentimental literature; the “rise” of the novel; art and aesthetics; science and technology; colonialism, slavery, and abolition; and women writers. Authors may include Frances Burney, Henry Fielding, Thomas Gray, Eliza Haywood, William Hogarth, Samuel Johnson, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Alexander Pope, Samuel Richardson, Mary Robinson, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and Jonathan Swift.

A study of poems, plays, prose fiction, and polemical works by medieval and early modern writers such as Anne Askew, Mary Wroth, Queen Elizabeth I, Mary Sidney, Amelia Lanyer, Lucy Hutchinson, Hester Pulter, and Margaret Cavendish. Topics may include race, women and science, love poetry from a female perspective, gender and trans studies, renarrations of the story of Eve, sexuality, and editorial history and practice.

A study of plays in English by such dramatists as Oscar Wilde, William Butler Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, John Millington Synge, Susan Glaspell, Langston Hughes, and Eugene O'Neill, as well as plays in translation by such dramatists as Henrik Ibsen, Anton Chekhov, August Strindberg, and Luigi Pirandello. 

A study of plays by such dramatists as Samuel Beckett, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Harold Pinter, Wole Soyinka, and Caryl Churchill, with background readings from other dramatic literatures.

A study of ten or more plays by at least six recent dramatists.

Students will read/watch screenings of drama in English and in translation from around the world, including Africa, East Asia, South Asia, the Middle East, the Caribbean, Latin America, and South America. Topics may include traditional forms (Kathakali dance, Noh and Kabuki, Beijing Opera, Nigerian masquerades) adapted for the modern stage; agit-prop and political drama; object performance; the place of drama within a global media ecology; and drama as a site of intercultural and transcultural appropriation, negotiation, and exchange.

This course examines the rise and popularization of spy fiction in the twentieth century. It focuses on authors such as Graham Greene and John le Carré within the context of the Cold War and the nuclear stand-off between the Soviet Union and the West.

This course surveys the poetry of the Victorian era in Britain, with a focus on experiments in poetic genre and form, and on the social and political commitments of poetry in a period of colonialism, industrialization, and changing ideas about gender and sexuality. Topics may include lyric and the dramatic monologue, the poetry of political protest, love and sexuality, feminism and queerness, aestheticism and decadence, empire and the emergence of global poetry in English, and pastoral and the poetry of urban life. Poets may include Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Alfred Tennyson, Robert Browning, Matthew Arnold, Christina Rossetti, D. G. Rossetti, Gerard Manley Hopkins, A. C. Swinburne, Toru Dutt, George Meredith, Augusta Webster, Amy Levy, Oscar Wilde, Michael Field, Thomas Hardy, Sarojini Naidu, and many others.

This course explores the history of Toronto/Tkaronto as it is documented in contemporary Indigenous texts and oral narratives. In addition to engaging with these works to provide a fuller understanding of Indigenous histories, treaties, and laws, this course may draw from archives such as First Story Toronto at the Native Canadian Centre of Toronto to shed light on present-day lived experiences. The course asks students to reflect on what it means to be treaty people within this territory, the responsibilities of living in the Toronto area, and how to be more mindful as treaty partners to Indigenous residents within this space and place. Course content may include audio recordings, fiction, non-fiction, poetry, visual art, film, and drama. The course may also include land-based and autoethnographic components.

This course will introduce students to historical and cultural concerns of nineteenth-century America through major subgenres of the novel, including the gothic, the sentimental, realism, and naturalism. Emphasis will be on shifts in the novel across the century as well as the relationship of the nineteenth-century novel to print culture, including serial publication in literary magazines and newspapers. We may also think about how non-fiction texts from this period draw on the conventions of fiction. Authors studied may include Charles Brockden Brown, Fanny Fern, George Lippard, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Charles Chesnutt, Mark Twain, Edith Wharton, and Pauline Hopkins.

Applying decolonial and Indigenous methodologies, students will explore Indigenous texts, media, and/or performances, spanning traditional and innovative forms, genres, and mediums engaged by Indigenous writers and makers. Topics may vary from year to year.

This course examines works by a variety of contemporary poets, focusing on how their writing participates in contemporary dialogues about art, society, and the larger world.

Special study of Hopkins, Yeats, Pound, Eliot, Stevens; selections from other poets.

In this advanced introduction to the work of Toni Morrison, we will encounter masterpieces such as Sula, Song of Solomon, and Beloved and pay particular attention to questions of literary tradition and inheritance, form and narrative voice, and ethics in contexts of oppression. We will read most of Morrison’s novels, alongside major essays, in the chronological order in which they were published. Students will be introduced to major themes in African American literary criticism and theory through close engagement with Morrison’s oeuvre and its critical legacy.

Canadian plays, with emphasis on major playwrights and on developments since 1940, but with attention also to the history of the theatre in Canada.

A study of twelve or more Canadian works of fiction, primarily novels.

A study of major Canadian poets, modern and contemporary.

This course is an advanced introduction to the concept and key texts of ‘Black British literature.’ A term arising directly in response to empire and the postcolonial, Black British literature indicates texts written by both African- and South Asian- descended writers from the Caribbean, Africa, and the subcontinent. Focused primarily on the twentieth-century, we will contextualize this literary tradition within wider questions of Britain in the world and how the idea of literary influence is challenged and re-formed. Writers may include: Sam Selvon, Hanif Kureishi, Derek Walcott, Stuart Hall, Buchi Emecheta, Caryl Philips, Zadie Smith, Helen Oyeyemi, and Warsan Shire.

A multi-lingual and multi-racial archipelago, the Caribbean has a rich literary and theoretical tradition: this course will introduce students to major figures in Caribbean Anglophone literature (including Jean Rhys, Kamau Brathwaite, George Lamming, Erna Brodber, V.S. Naipaul, Jamaica Kincaid, in addition to some texts read in English translation (including Aimé Cesaire, Alejo Carpentier, Maryse Condé, Marie Vieux Chauvet)

Close encounters with recent writing in Canada: new voices, new forms, and new responses to old forms. Texts may include or focus on poetry, fiction, drama, non-fiction, or new media.

A concentrated study of one aspect of Canadian literature or literary culture, such as a particular subgenre, author, period, or theme, or the application of a particular critical approach. Topics may vary from year to year.

This course examines how stories by Indigenous Peoples assert the inherent right to Indigenous sovereignty, self-determination, and self-government, with emphasis on settler colonialism in Canada and in the United States of America. This course engages with Indigenous narratives to understand the relationship between concepts of land rights, Indigenous resurgence, reconciliation, decolonization, and the politics of recognition. Topics may include Indigenous futurisms, digital sovereignty, treaty-making, Indigenous feminisms, sovereign eroticism, Indigenous political movements, land-based organizing, and environmental and climate justice. Texts may include the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and the UN Working Group on Indigenous Peoples, as well as film, music, literature, and non-literature from individuals such as Glen Coulthard, Winona Laduke, Alanis Obomsawin, Tracey Lindberg, Audra Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Joy Harjo, Leroy Little Bear, Snotty Nosed Rez Kids, and Taiaiake Alfred.

This course explores writing in a variety of genres produced in the American colonies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, such as narratives, poetry, autobiography, journals, essays, sermons, and court transcripts.

This course explores the origins of Canadian literature, with an emphasis upon the post-Confederation period. Students will examine work in a range of genres, which may include novels, short stories, life writing and poetry, and will consider how the nation is being created and debated in print. Topics may include settler colonialism, nationalism, and representation. Attention may also be paid to Canadian book history and print culture in the period.

This course explores Canadian literature from the 1920s to the contemporary period. Students will examine the work of major authors in their cultural, social, and historical contexts. Topics may include the development of literary modernism in Canada, regional literary geographies, postmodern innovations, multiculturalism and hybridity, and Indigenous literary and cultural production in the part of Turtle Island that is called Canada.

This course explores American writing in a variety of genres from the end of the Revolution to the beginning of the twentieth century.

This course explores twentieth-century American writing in a variety of genres.

This course explores six or more works by at least four contemporary American writers of fiction.

A concentrated study of one aspect of American literature or literary culture, such as a particular subgenre, author, period, or theme, or the application of a particular critical approach. Topics may vary from year to year.

This class is an advanced introduction to the field of African American literary studies, tracing its origins and emergence through the slave trade to the present day, with particular focus on nineteenth- and twentieth-century writing, and the criticism and theory to which it gives rise. Authors studied may include: Harriet Jacobs, Charles Chesnutt, Pauline Hopkins, James Baldwin, Gayl Jones, Toni Morrison.