Department of English

How do narratives traverse different media across place and time? This course traces stories' material histories from antiquity to the world wide web.

Learn how books have been crafted, collected, stored, and circulated, including historical editorial choices, reader responses, and libraries/archives.

With hands-on analysis in Penn's special collection, case studies are paired with theoretical considerations of literary reception/adaptation, originality, cultural memory - the relation of a narrative to its transmission.

You have the option to respond creatively in this course's final critical engagement.