This introduction to medieval and early modern literature involves detailed study of a range of works by major authors like Chaucer, Shakespeare, Donne, Milton, and Aphra Behn. This study, construed as a reading of highly individual texts, or as a sequence that constructs something of a textual history, immediately strikes us as challenging, by virtue of its alterity, its otherness. That has value for us, viewing this literature from our historical and cultural distance, not least because it requires us to bring our historical imagination into play. In encountering these works, we pay close attention to the language in which they were written, and how it may be translated, observing major shifts from Middle English verse to Elizabethan and seventeenth poetry. The tutorial discussions are designed to give you practice in the variety of critical approaches and responsive reading that you will put to work in the assignments and the final exam.
A number of topics and tropes will be discussed in the course of tracing various histories through the texts studied:
Travel, quest and discovery
Belief and burning
The place of women and women’s speech
Resistance
Sexuality
Identity and self-fashioning
Imagined communities and the making of a nation
Alterity and innovation