What is 20th century modernity and what does it mean to be modern? This course studies 20th century British and anglophone literature together with the culture that produced it, in order to concentrate on the relation between the literary text, history and society. The themes of the class will include modernization and technology, war and its aftermath, urban experience, new definitions of gender, colonialism and primitivism, 1950s youth cultures, British national identity at the time of the Cold War, James Bond as national icon, the end of empire, postcolonialism and immigration, modernism and postmodernism. Readings by Conrad, Ngugi Wa Thiongo, Yeats, Joyce, Woolf, Stevie Smith, W.H. Auden, Seamus Heaney, Eavan Boland, Hanif Kureishi, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.