RENAISSANCE BRITISH LITERATURE

(This course fulfills Writing Intensive
requirements for General Education and English major requirements for Single
Author OR pre-1700 courses, as well as 400-level courses)

General Description

This course will
introduce you to major prose and poetry of the English Renaissance period
(early 1500s through the 1660s), with attention to their historical, cultural,
and biographical contexts (e.g., worldwide war with Spain in the sixteenth
century; religious, political and economic conflicts within England, leading to
a Civil War and a revolution after 1642, movement from court and aristocratic
literary culture to middle class readers and works;  Spenser’s role as a colonialist
administrator, Milton’s role as a revolutionary in print), as well as their
literary modes and forms (e.g., epic romance, sonnets and songs,
utopian/allegorical/mythopoetic narratives and treatises, essays and political
arguments, metaphysical poetry, religious poetry and meditations).We begin with
the most important imaginative work of political philosophy in the sixteenth
century, Thomas More’s Utopiaand end
with the most important work of political philosophy of the early modern
period, Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan.Important writers to be studies include
Thomas More, Sir Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe, William
Shakespeare, John Donne, George Herbert, Francis Bacon, John Milton, Thomas
Hobbes. 

 

Procedures

Lectures on the
works and their contexts will be combined with discussion of questions posed by
myself, questions posed by you, and discussion of how to use the readings to
compose two extensive comparative papers, one on prose works and the other on
poetry. Additional discussion will take place electronically, through responses
to instructor- and student-posed questions on laulima.

 

Requirements

·      Attendance and participation 10%

·      Digital class discussion 10%

·      Typed portfolio of four digital
responses (4 –6 pages) 20%

·      Sixteenth-century comparative paper
(6 –8 pages) 20%

·      Seventeenth-century comparative
paper (6 –8 pages) 20%

·      Final examination-closed and open
book 20%

 

Required books

·      Norton Anthology of English
Literature, Volume One, B  Oxford UP

·      Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan.Norton Critical Edition