ENG331/001
Renaissance Literature in English: Contact and Contention
Instructor: Dr. Derrick Higginbotham
Time: Tuesdays and Thursdays, 10.30 – 11.45am
Location: SAKAMAKI, B101
Email: deh2@hawaii.edu
Office Hours: TBD
Location: 618 KUY
Course Description
‘The Renaissance,’ or more commonly, the ‘early modern period,’ which roughly covers from 1500 to the 1660s, was a time of profound political upheaval that shook England’s social structure. Some of these transformations include the emergence of print technology in the late fifteenth century, which led to greater distribution of texts and knowledge than previously possible; the religious Reformation in the 1530s that splintered Catholicism into various forms of Protestantism, precipitating a long-term crisis in religious identity; and the onset of capitalism, with its challenge to England’s class system as people gained and lost wealth with a rapidity not seen before. As capitalism quickened, the English also began to muscle into global trade markets and eventually succeed in doing so during the seventeenth century with the founding of settlements, including early plantations, throughout the Americas, along with an increased presence in the Mediterranean and North Africa. This class’s focus on ‘contact and contention’ captures the social fluidity and conflicts that these overlapping changes stimulated, and it also provides a framework that can link the cultural and aesthetic motifs of early modern literary culture to both its own time and ours.
Upheaval in society can inspire artists to contemplate other ways to organize the social order and to think critically about social differences and their meanings. Looking through the lens of literature, this course seeks to understand how English culture during the Renaissance imagined others within their geographic world, i.e. England, and the worlds of others, i.e. places across the globe including the South Pacific, with special attention to how class, gender, sexuality, race, and religion intersect and diverge. As we study this literature, we will encounter various genres like drama, travel writing, sonnets, and religious poetry. We also will situate these varied texts within their historical environments, attending to context as one way to unpack their meanings, even as we pay attention to their formal features. Over the course of the semester, we will read works by Thomas Wyatt, Amelia Lanyer, Isabella Whitney, Ben Jonson, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, and Margaret Cavendish, amongst others. We will attend especially to the representation of space, whether imagined islands or more localized spaces like estates or gardens, unpacking the politics of land during a period of pronounced social change.
This course will be face-to-face and it will over the pre-1700 historical breadth requirement.
Tentative Book List (They will be available at the campus bookstore):
Cavendish, Margaret. The Blazing World and Other Writings. Kate Lilley, ed. Penguin Classics, 1994.
Marlowe, Christopher. Doctor Faustus: A Norton Critical Edition. David Scott Kastan and Matthew Hunter, eds. New York: W. W. Norton, Co., 2023.
Shakespeare, William. Macbeth. Sandra Clark and Pamela Mason, eds. New York: Arden, 2015.
All other texts for this class will be provided as handouts in class or PDFs in advance.
Student Learning Outcomes:
In this course, students will:
- Practice reading literary texts critically and appreciate how genre and other formal features shape content
- Improve skills in close reading of texts, both literary and historical
- Acquire an understanding of the history of the English Renaissance
- Gain an understanding of literature’s potential and limits as a source for cultural history
- Strengthen their skills in public speaking
- Improve their skills in incorporating and documenting secondary scholarship when crafting an argumentative essay=
Methods of Assessment:
Participation 10%
Oral Presentation 20%
Textual Analysis Assignment 15%
Research Paper 40%
Final Exam 15%