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Literature Before 1660

ENGL 020.301
instructor(s):
MW 3:30-5

This course is designed to familiarize students with a range of Middle English and Renaissance texts. We will examine the ways in which literary works participate in this period’s shifting debates about overlapping religious, racial, national, sexual, and gendered identities, and we will be particularly interested in analyzing how a text’s formal components mediate its larger themes and arguments. Discussions will range from sexual violence in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales to the racialization of religion in The Faerie Queene to the limitations of human knowledge in Doctor Faustus and Paradise Lost. All students will write several short essays and take a final exam.

fulfills requirements
Sector 3: Early Literature to 1660 of the Standard Major