This course explores the poets, playwrights, and prose writers who shaped the English literary Renaissance. Authors to be studied may include Thomas More, Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe, Mary Wroth, John Donne, William Shakespeare, Elizabeth Cary, George Herbert, Ben Jonson, Thomas Middleton, and John Webster. Their writings are placed in the sociopolitical context of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. For each issue, we will explore academic scholarship, media representations, legislative actions, and judicial opinions. Offers students an opportunity to explore historical and theoretical problems related to the study of English literature from 1660 to 1800.
Topics change with each new seminar.
Romantic authors such as Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Keats, Mary Shelley, DeQuincey, Burns, Blake, and Byron will be studied to uncover what the Romantic sensibility is and how it relates to nature, the self, and society. Authors studied include Charles Darwin, Charles Dickens, Alfred Tennyson, John Stuart Mill, Charlotte Bronte, Thomas Hardy and Oscar Wilde, and less familiar but important people such as Henry Mayhew and Harriet Taylor. This course is an intensive introduction to the art of the two writers. Poems, short stories, and novels by both are studied. This is a course in the inception, development, and effect of the literary movement that, during the end of the last century and the first decades of this century, created a self-consciously Irish literature in English.