Introduction to early modern English literature. A course in 28 sessions

Abstract

This course offers an overview of English literature from the sixteenth century to the early eighteenth century, with a focus on poetry. It is designed for second-year L2 undergraduate students majoring/minoring in English and is structured around five Units: (1) pre-Elizabethan poetry (Thomas Wyatt, Henry Howard) and prose fiction (Thomas More’s Utopia); (2) Elizabethan poetry (Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare); (3) early seventeenth-century poetry (John Donne), prose (Francis Bacon, Robert Burton), and drama (Ben Jonson’s Volpone); (4) Restoration prose fiction (Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World, Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko) and poetry (John Milton’s Paradise Lost), and (5) early eighteenth-century prose fiction (Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver Travels).