(This
course fulfills Writing Intensive requirements for General Education and
English major requirements pre-1700 courses)
General Description
This course will introduce
you to major works and writers of prose,
poetry, and drama 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).Important writers to be studied include
Thomas More, Sir Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe, William
Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, John Donne, George Herbert, Francis Bacon, John
Milton.
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. 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 book
Norton Anthology of English
Literature, Volume One, B Oxford UP