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The Age of Milton

ENGL 038.001
instructor(s):
MWF 1

The seventeenth century was a period of upheaval in England, beginning with the death of Queen Elizabeth and the accession of a Scottish king to the English throne, and including a massive religious war on the Continent; civil war in England; the execution of the king and the institution of republican government; radical religious experimentation; transformations in sexual, gender, and familial politics; mass panic and a government witch-hunt over alleged Catholic subversion; and a second revolution that produced another “foreign” English king. We will survey this remarkably exciting period of English literary history, including work by John Donne, Ben Jonson, William Shakespeare, Aemilia Lanyer, George Herbert, Robert Herrick, Andrew Marvell, John Dryden, John Wilmot, earl of Rochester, and others. Our readings will center on (surprise, surprise) an extended study of John Milton (1608-1674), beginning with some of his prose and early poetry before moving on to large portions of Paradise Lost and its sequel, Paradise Regained. We will contextualize Milton’s great poem by reading some of the puritan-republican Lucy Hutchinson’s striking epic Order and Disorder: Meditations upon the Creation and Fall, which treats many of the same subjects. Our focus throughout will be on the relation of this literature to the questions of national, religious, political, and patriarchal sovereignty that dominated the era. Requirements will likely include a midterm and a final exam, and two short papers.

fulfills requirements