The Edwardian era (literally, 1901-1910 but usually seen as extending to the ‘Great War’) is often mythologised as a tranquil phase of long, hot summers and country-house parties. In fact, it was a time of social upheaval and an enormously rich period in English fiction. All kinds of disturbing developments – feminism, socialism, political agitation, class conflicts and family tensions – were brilliantly reflected in literature. Matching this diversity was a wide range of forms: comedies, thrillers, social problem novels, experiments with modernism.
On this course we shall attempt to do justice to the period's astonishing variety. Starting with Arnold Bennett’s classic account (in Anna of the Five Towns) of resistance to provincial patriarchy, we shall trace the struggle for female independence through Edith Wharton’s tragic The House of Mirth and E.M. Forster’s comic A Room with a View. In Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent, a startlingly prescient treatment of terrorism, we shall explore a deft fusion of political analysis with innovative use of disrupted chronology. Finally, we shall look closely at Ford Madox Ford's classic The Good Soldier, a book quintessentially Edwardian in theme but modernist in form and technique.