Year: Final
Part of the year: Full Year
Module Leader: Sarah Carter
Assessments:
Keywords:
early modern writing; Humanism; sonnets; Petrarch; epic poetry; epyllia; Civil War poetry; pamphlets; rhetoric; love and courtship; carpe diem poetry; elegy; intertextuality; creative imitation; gender theory; Ovid; metaphysical poetry; the Reformation; nationalism; allegory; politics; cultural materialism
Description:
On this module you will engage with a range of poetry and prose written between the early sixteenth century and the mid seventeenth century. As such, the module works as a companion to the level two module which focuses on the drama of this same period (though please note, the latter is not a prerequisite). This time period is one of great social change and literary invention, which saw Britain change its national religion several times and experience its only civil war. Against this background you shall find writers preoccupied with more secular and enduring human concerns: love, sex, money, and power. We will consider how social change leads to writers attempting forms of writing not seen before in English literature, such as the utopian fantasy, the epic poem, and the erotic narrative poem, and how inspiration from both continental and classical writing shaped fashionable forms of poetry. We will engage with contemporary thinking about literature and its importance in relation to national identity, as well as how the focus on classical texts in formal education inspired writers. We will consider the ways writers represent gender, sexuality, politics, and class, and the way the literary community and the unregulated publishing process complicates readings. You will learn to apply a range of relevant theories, and to consider the texts in their cultural, political, and historical contexts. You will undertake close reading alongside this, to consider the impact of form and style.
Prerequisites: N/A
Useful Information:
Early Modern Studies; sixteenth and seventeenth century literature; 1513-1660; culture; politics; gender theory
Set texts (items must be purchased or borrowed unless otherwise noted):
John Donne, selected poems [from Hunter ed. anthology, see below]*
Christopher Marlowe, Hero and Leander (1598) [poem]
Andrew Marvell, Upon Appleton House (1651) [poem]
John Milton, Paradise Lost (1667) Penguin edition (ed. by John Leonard) or the Longman edition (ed. by Alastair Fowler) [Books 1,2,4,9] [poem]
Thomas More, Utopia (1513) The set translation is Ralph Robinson’s 1556 version, available in Three Early Modern Utopias, ed. by Susan Bruce (Oxford World’s Classics, 2008 reissue) [prose]
William Shakespeare, Sonnets and Venus and Adonis (1593) (Arden / Oxford) [poetry]
Phillip Sidney, The Defence of Poesy (1595) [Anthology*] [prose]
Rachel Speght, A Mouzell for Melastomus (1617) [Anthology*] [prose]
Edmund Spenser, The Faery Queene (1596) (Penguin, 2003) [Books 1,3] [poem]
Thomas Wyatt, selected sonnets [Anthology*] [poetry]
*Renaissance Literature: An Anthology ed. by John C. Hunter (second edition) (Blackwell, 2009) [this contains several of the primary texts and a lot more relevant material]
NB: Photocopies / direction on EEBO (Early English Books Online) will be provided for more obscure texts.
Teaching methods/structure:
Lectures; seminars; workshops; presentations; independent reading and thinking; training in relevant skills including using research resources to locate relevant secondary materials and databases to locate digitised primary resources.
Please view the module specification for the learning outcomes for this module.
Contact details for further queries (module leader):
Email: sarah.carter@ntu.ac.uk
Tel: 0115 848 6642
Office hours in MAE322: https://ecm3cartes.youcanbook.me/