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Course overview and aims

This course covers one of the most innovative periods of English literature. This period of global expansion, travel, and intercultural encounters, of violent religious controversy, of early scientific experiments and life-writing, is filled with voices both familiar and unfamiliar. The era produces John Donne’s whimsically seductive love lyrics and erotic religious sonnets; the compulsive overreaching of Marlowe’s thwarted protagonists; the claustrophobic steaminess and stylised gore of revenge tragedy; and some of the most daring literary production from the pens of female writers. Among them are Isabella Whitney, the first woman to publish secular poems under her own name; Mary Sidney, who arguably out-Sidneys her brother Philip in poetic skill and inventiveness; Aemilia Lanyer, who reconstructs in her poetry a self-sufficient female coterie; Elizabeth Cary, who pushes the rhetorical possibilities of drama; and Mary Wroth, who brilliantly inverts the sonnet tradition and writes dizzying prose fiction. It is a period of astonishing imaginative audacity.

Stretching from the Reformation to the birth of science writing in English, this century of literature is a period of firsts: the first women writers published in English (studied in your first Autumn set-text); the first prose romances, novellas, and arguably also the first novels in English (your second set-text); the first epic romance in English (your third set-text); the first revenge tragedies (your fourth set-text). The period also sees the first English stage comedies, tragicomedies, domestic tragedies, and masques; the first sonnets and the first metaphysical poetry in English; the first epigrams and pastoral poems in English; and – genres we now take for granted as students of literature – the first English essays and even the first literary criticism in English. While taking inspiration from classical and medieval sources, Renaissance literature is often regarded as a harbinger of modernity: critics routinely label the period ‘early modern’ because it reaches forwards with remarkable daring to shape the genres, styles, and intellectual culture familiar to us today.

The course is taught through 20 weekly lectures and 8 fortnightly seminars. Lectures discuss either single authors and works, or major genres, themes, and cultural contexts. Autumn seminars cover four set works (assessed in Section A of the exam) representing the period’s four major genres:

1. Poetry ÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌý Renaissance Women Poets (Aemilia Lanyer, Isabella Whitney, Mary Sidney)

2. Prose ÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌý Philip Sidney, The Old Arcadia

3. Epic ÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌý Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene (Book 3 only)

4. Drama ÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌý John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi

Autumn lectures address these four set texts as well as major themes and genres from the period, allowing students to understand how these works fit into wider literary and intellectual contexts.

Term 2 seminars and lectures

Spring seminars offer opportunities for lecturers to share specialist interests and for students to develop areas of personal expertise. Themes in Spring seminars in recent years have included:

•ÌýÌýÌýÌý Renaissance literature and the body

•ÌýÌýÌýÌý Renaissance doubt and scepticism

•ÌýÌýÌýÌý magic and the supernatural in the Renaissance

•ÌýÌýÌýÌý distraction, memory and subjectivity in Renaissance literature

•ÌýÌýÌýÌý women and violence in Renaissance

•ÌýÌýÌýÌý experimental writing in the Renaissance

Spring lectures cover a chronological sweep of authors, genres, and topics. Work covered in Spring lectures and seminars is assessed in Section B of the exam.

Recommended Reading

A lecture list specifying the titles and running order of Autumn and Spring lectures is available on Moodle or from the convenor, along with a general reading list which details recommended editions of the four set texts and offers suggestions for wider reading. Further recommended reading may be given in lectures and seminars too.

Assessment

Examination is by means of a written exam or, if preferred, a Course Essay (provided no other Course Essay is being submitted by the candidate in that year). You are welcome to direct any questions to the convenor.