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Surveys of Literatures in English
Traditionally, English departments have offered survey courses focused on either British or American literature. The survey courses at Rockford College fuse these traditions and also include texts from other cultures, translated into or written in English.

Survey of Literatures in English I
Historical survey of major texts in various cultural traditions from the 8th to the 15th centuries. For example, students can expect to study Bede and Beowulf, consider the new style of Dante, travel to Canterbury with Chaucer, and visit the city of ladies with Christine de Pizan.

Survey of Literatures in English II
Historical survey of major texts in various cultural traditions from the 16th and 17th centuries. For example, students might combine canonical writers such as Erasmus, Rabelais, and Spenser with the travel literature of Columbus and Diaz.

Survey of Literatures in English III
Historical survey of major texts in various cultural traditions from the 18th to the late-19th centuries. This survey takes up themes such as revolution and resistance, in the tradition of Burke and Wollstonecraft; womanhood, variously defined by Grimké and Hawthorne; and the strange and the uncanny, with—who else!—Poe and Coleridge.

Survey of Literatures in English IV
Historical survey of major texts in various cultural traditions from the late-19th century to modernism. Students might explore how the industrial revolution is represented by writers as diverse as Mark Twain and Joseph Conrad, Henry Lawson and Miles Franklin, Virginia Woolf and T.S. Eliot, Toru Dutt and R.K. Narayan.

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