How do our habits as readers reflect and shape our interactions with the world around us? What do the poetic, dramatic, and narrative works of Western literature reveal about who we are and what we struggle to be? How, as readers of Scripture, do we approach the wide spectrum of texts that make up the Western literary canon?

This course offers an introduction to the history of Western literature in the Modern period, focusing largely upon literature in English, and is designed to help students refine and articulate their sense of the role of imaginative texts in the life of a Christian. Our aim is both to develop an understanding of central literary works in their historical and intellectual contexts and, in doing so, to develop our own sense of why and how and what a Christian should read.

To be read and discussed are works by Shakespeare, Milton, Alexander Pope, Romantic writers, Victorian authors, Dostoevsky, and late 19th and 20th century writers.