B-Literature 1500-1789
Literature, 1500-1789 courses focus on writings during the period of European exploration and colonization -- from the early English Renaissance to the late eighteenth-century -- in order to foster familiarity with key works in British and American literary history. Literary history illustrates how literary works reflect, address, and resist the social and political environments in which they are produced as well as other works that have preceded them. The study of early periods in particular sensitizes readers to historical transformations of the language itself.
12082
This course focuses on Shakespeare’s second set of history plays, known as the Henriad. These plays depict a moment of crisis in English history, when a king is dethroned, several popular uprisings follow, and eventually a modern nation-state emerges. While the plays’ understanding of government... (read more)
33632
The Gothic Novel
What does it mean when we say a text is Gothic? How does the Gothic affect us, its readers or viewers? The Gothic has often coincided with moments of great societal change or transitional time periods. In difficult times particularly, we may find the Gothic’s dark vision... (read more)
33638
What do you want to do with Shakespeare? This course will give you some tools and space to think about what makes the plays work and how you develop your own interpretive relationship with them. We will explore Shakespeare’s play texts as a basis for performance and use our own close analyses of... (read more)
22483
Spenser claims the goal of his epic, The Faerie Queene, is “to fashion a gentleman”—that is, to make a person from a poem. How does reading shape life outside reading, and what would it mean to think of reading as an exercise in self-creation? The Faerie Queene investigates these questions... (read more)
16694
English 461 is an introduction to the literature of colonial North America and the Early United States, from the 1530s to the 1820s. This course is designed around four feature films: Cabeza de Vaca, Black Robe, Pocahontas, and Jefferson in Paris. These movies were based on the... (read more)
17059
In this course we will read Macbeth, King Lear, Coriolanus, and Antony and Cleopatra to think about how they represent cultural crisis at every scale: the large scale of a society, country, city-state, or empire in turmoil, the small scale of individual errors,... (read more)
35789
Travel, or the journey, is often conceptualized in relation to home as the point of departure and return: in Homer’s Odyssey, the hero wanders as his wife waits faithfully in Ithaca. These gendered roles—man as traveler, woman as homebody—reflect age-old assumptions about travel. But... (read more)
35826
Shakespeare Page and Stage (ENG 352) explores Shakespeare’s play texts as a basis for a production on stage. We will use our own close analyses of Shakespeare’s sentences, the play’s structural components, and our own informed imaginations to create character, scene, and image maps of Macbeth... (read more)
35827
In the England of 1601, the disciplines of politics, philosophy, science, medicine, law, and literature were all to some degree subsumed by the master discourse of religion. But by 1701, the human and the natural sciences had begun to emerge in something like their modern forms, while (at least... (read more)
22076
Students in “Shakespeare’s World” learn to read Shakespeare’s works in relation to the cultural, literary, and historical contexts in which he wrote. This can be a first course in Shakespeare (no prerequisites). In Winter 2021, students will read Hamlet in relation to earlier revenge... (read more)
12482
... (read more)
37144
How many novelists have you heard of who wrote before Jane Austen? By Austen’s day—the early 19th century—the English novel had come into its own, following roughly a... (read more)
22238
Travel, or the journey, is often conceptualized in relation to home as the point of departure and return: in Homer’s Odyssey,... (read more)
26558
Students in “Shakespeare’s World” learn to read Shakespeare’s works in relation to the cultural, literary, and historical contexts in... (read more)
26568
This interdisciplinary course looks at how ideas of nature and the natural world shape early modern understandings of the Americas.... (read more)
12124
The Rise of the Novel
How many novelists have you heard of who wrote before Jane Austen? By Austen’s day—the... (read more)
32012
Major British Writers: Aphra Behn is an examination of this important writer who dominated London theatre in the 1670s, invented the English novel, translated philosophic and... (read more)
36168
Spenser claims the goal of his epic, The Faerie Queene, is “to fashion a gentleman”—that is, to make a person from a poem. What would it mean to think... (read more)
36172
English 461 is an introduction to the literature of colonial America and the Early Republic. It satisfies the Literature: 1500-1789 requirement in the English... (read more)
23087
This course traces ethnicity, cultural interaction, and forms of folkloristic expression in the British Isles and Ireland. Britain and Ireland possess a... (read more)
27067
Students in this course will closely read Shakespeare’s plays and poems, attending to Shakespeare’s rich language, nuanced characters, and persistent... (read more)
16081
This course circulates through the world of the novel by taking a slightly unusual perspective: that of subjects and objects. When the novel emerged in eighteenth-century England, “novels increased more than tea,” as Franco Moretti explains. Novels were the product of a commercial and leisured... (read more)
32025
The novel as we know it today did not exist until the early nineteenth century, the end point of this course. Before then, fictional prose narratives circulated in Britain under various labels, including “romance,” “history,” “true history” or “secret history,” as well as “novel.” Moreover, the... (read more)
26834
The English Novel: Subject, Object and Abject
This course circulates through the world of the novel by taking a slightly unusual perspective: that of subjects and objects. The rise of the novel goes hand-in-hand with a focus on objects and commodities that help construct the subject as a... (read more)
26850
Participating in the political revolution, religious ferment, and literary experimentation of his time, the poetry and prose of John Milton offer us fascinating and beautiful examples of the engagement of literature with real-world political and ethical crises. This work may resonate with... (read more)
27212
The complex cultural history of Great Britain and Ireland is the focus of this course. We study folk and popular traditions that are current or have been collected in this region, particularly noting how these influence art, literature, history, and socio-political institutions as well as... (read more)
27589
In 1797 the London Critical Review proclaimed, “This may be called the age of peregrination; for we have reason to believe, that the desire of seeing foreign countries never before so diffusively operated.” British travelers circled the globe, pursuing exploration, trade, diplomacy,... (read more)
16954
Slavery shaped the ecology, economy, and culture of the Atlantic Rim, including parts of Europe, Africa, and the Americas. In the long eighteenth century (1660-1838), British slavery on the Caribbean sugar islands reached its peak, was fought by the abolitionist movement and ended by Parliament... (read more)
27017
English 461 is an introduction to the literature of colonial America and the Early Republic. It satisfies the 1500-1789 area requirement for the English major. The course does not emphasize familiar genres of novel, poetry, or short story. Instead, we will be reading missionary relations,... (read more)