20th-century country house fiction: Forster’s Howard’s End, Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited and McEwan’s Atonement

The English country house as a cultural concept was celebrated in 17th-century poetry and has been a favourite setting and theme for many a novel since the 18th century. This course explores two traditional examples, E M Forster’s Howards End (1910) and Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (1946) before discussing Ian McEwan’s post-modern use of it in Atonement (2001).