This
course fulfills Writing Intensive requirements for General Education and
English major requirements for pre-1700 courses
General Description
This course will introduce
you to major 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, 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, 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 book
Norton Anthology of English
Literature, Volume One, B Oxford UP