Renaissance Literature from Utopia to Paradise Lost

Module code: EN3320

This module introduces you to the landmark texts in poetry and prose of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, taking you from the court intrigues of Henry VIII to the conflicts of the English Civil War. Together, we will explore how writing opened up new worlds of imagination, political debate, religious conflict, and intellectual discovery. English Renaissance literature was energised by the new humanist learning pioneered in Italy; by exploration and empire-building in the New World; by the possibilities opened up through the new medium of print; and by the often violent controversies that followed the Reformation. We will consider how literary texts addressed and shaped questions of gender, race, and power; conceived of the body, mind, and spirit; and consciously reflected back on themselves in the physical features of books and the business of writing itself.

Among the texts we will study are:

  • Thomas More’s Utopia, a daring, multi-voiced work of imagination and travel that inspires writers to this day;
  • Christopher Marlowe’s Hero and Leander, a homoerotic narrative that rewrote the Roman poet Ovid for Elizabethan England;
  • sonnet sequences written by male and female authors, including Shakespeare’s Sonnets addressed both to a ‘lovely boy’ and a woman whose eyes are ‘nothing like the sun’;
  • lyric poetry by authors such as John Donne, George Herbert and Katherine Philips, who used this intensely concentrated mode to voice desire, sacred and profane and to push the boundaries of literary expression;
  • John Milton’s Paradise Lost, the greatest epic poem in the English language, which takes us in the company of angels and devils into the depths of hell, to the gardens of paradise, and towards a tree with a very tempting fruit...

We will learn in a mixture of seminars and workshops, with trips outside the classroom to look at rare books of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and to explore the vestiges of the Renaissance in modern-day Leicester.

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