In this class, you'll sharpen your skills at literary analysis and
problem-solving through an intensive study of the literature of early
modern England. Elites in the 16th and 17th centuries believed
they were inaugurating a new age in the cultural history of Europe, and
their energetic literary experiments openly competed not only with one
another, but also with the past. By examining a relatively large
group of authors, we will put ourselves in a position to make good
arguments about how these self-conscious innovators aimed to
reshape aesthetic, intellectual, spiritual, and social values.
The class will begin with love poetry, that eternally fashionable, endlessly flexible, and sometimes perilously repetitive form. From Spenser's elegant Amoretti
(1595) through the graphic naughtiness of the Earl of Rochester
(1670s), we can not only trace the changing styles and attitudes of
successive generations of poets--we can also ask what values led poets
to compete with each other in such a tiny arena of the literary
possible.
We will turn to Christian poetry
with lyric poems by John Donne and George Herbert and a sacred
drama by John Milton. All of these authors were clearly concerned
to make their religion interesting, indeed "identifiable" for their
readers (to use some Hollywood-speak). That orientation will let
us think more broadly about what it meant to live in a world where
Christianity, of one form or another, shaped countless aspects of
personal and public life.
Finally, we will look at some experiments in imagining entire alternate worlds--a vastly different kind of writing from the short, focused, and deliberately subjective lyric poem. A book of Spenser's Faerie Queene
will show us the chivalric imagination operating at full blast, while
Francis Bacon's proposals for new scientific research and institutions
will illustrate, among other things, the utopian tendency in early
modern thought.