Renaissance Literature in English: Imagining Other Worlds
Upheaval in society can inspire artists to contemplate other ways to organize the social order and to conceptualize social differences. Looking through the lens of literature, this course seeks to understand how Renaissance English literature and culture imagined other worlds and the worlds of others, with special attention to how race, gender, sexuality, and religion intersect and diverge. As we study this literature, we will encounter various genres like epics, utopias, drama, travel writing, sonnets, religious poetry, and saints’ lives. 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 Edmund Spenser, Thomas Wyatt, Amelia Lanyer, Isabella Whitney, Thomas More, Ben Jonson, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, Thomas Nashe, John Milton, and Margaret Cavendish, amongst others.
The Renaissance period, which roughly covers around 1500 to the 1660s, was a time of profound socio-economic upheaval that shook England’s social structure. Some of these transformations include the emergence of print technology in the late fifteenth century, which lead 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 social hierarchy. As capitalism quickened, the English also began trying 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’ focus on imagining ‘mundus alter et idem’—a world different yet the same as one’s own—provides a framework that can link the cultural and aesthetic motifs of early modern literary culture to its own time as well as ours.
Methods of Assessment:
Participation 10%
Response Paper 1 (650 words) 10%
Response Paper 2 (650 words) 15%
Blog Responses 10%
Midterm Exam 15%
Final Paper Proposal 10%
Final Paper 30%
Texts:
Bruce, Susan, ed. Three Early Modern Utopias. Oxford University Press, 2009.
Cavendish, Margaret. The Blazing World and Other Writings. Kate Lilley, ed. Penguin Classics, 1994.
Jonson, Ben, Epicoene. Roger Victor Holdsmith, ed. Bloomsbury Metheun Drama, 2002.
Marlowe, Christopher. Edward II. Stephen Guy-Bray, ed. Bloomsbury Metheun Drama, 2014.
Milton, John. Paradise Lost. Stephen Orgel and Jonathan Goldberg, eds. Oxford University Press, 2008.
Nashe, Thomas. The Unfortunate Traveler and Other Works. Penguin Classics, 1972.
Shakespeare, William. The Tempest. Barbara Mowat and Paul Werstine, eds. Simon & Shuster, 2004.
There will be a Class Reader available with poems and short dramatic texts by a variety of authors.