ENGLISH 331W RENAISSANCE BRITISH LITERATURE Mark Heberle
(MWF 11:30 –12:20 Spring 2016)
(This course fulfills Writing Intensive requirements for General Education and English major requirements for pre-1700 courses, as well as for 300-level 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