Department of English

This course is designed to introduce students to major works from the height of Middle English literature to the literature of the seventeenth century. The course will move chronologically through the material, emphasizing how specific genres are accentuated and transformed within particular cultural and historical contexts. We will read narrative poetry by Chaucer, Skelton, Spenser, and Milton; dramatic works by Shakespeare, Jonson and Webster; and lyric poetry by Daniel, Donne, Wroth, Herbert, and Marvell. The course will also include selections from what, at the time, was a less easily defined generic category, prose works: The Book of Margery Kempe, More's Utopia, Sidney's Defence of Poetry, Nashe's Unfortunate Traveller, and excerpts from Bacon's essays.