We will be reading as much of what Spenser and Milton wrote as we can manage, specifically questioning how their writing of the two most important epics in the English Renaissance shaped their careers, giving, indeed, the shape of a "career" to their oeuvres. We shall thus be concerned fundamentally with the issue of genre (what is an epic?), but also with the way in which generic considerations speak not only to literary history but to contemporary politics and economics. We shall thus be broaching such topics as England's colonization of Ireland, the New World, and involvement in the slave trade, as well as the problem of Elizabeth Tudor's female rule and Parliament's regicide, specifically as these issues necessarily engage with epic as a genre. We will inevitably be comparing and contrasting the two epic practices at two different (but closely connected) periods in English literary and political history, posing as an overriding question the relationship of the epic to its historical moment. One short paper (10 pp.). One in-class response to a student's paper. One report. One longer paper (20 pp.). No final.