It is therefore important for continuing graduate students to pre-register for the courses they want. New graduate students may not pre-register for their first semester. This course focuses on the politics of the vernacular in the period often identified as the Age of Chaucer.
English literature begins here, both as a body of works and as an idea.
The usual approach to this period is from above, from the royal court and the high culture it generated. Instead, we will enter the period from below, or from the margins of late medieval cultural construction. Although we will read some Chaucer, William Langland's convoluted, textually unstable, and historically marginalized Piers Plowman will serve as the primary text. R.B. Dobson, The Peasants' Revolt of 1381 . Over the past twenty years and especially in the past decade, there has been a heightened attention paid to the analytic questions posed by Jane Austen's work.