Mattison, Julia
TR 9:35 AM
Park Hall 0126
This course familiarizes students with representative texts of early English writers, from the Beowulf poet to Margaret Cavendish. Drawing on the works of major authors like Chaucer and Shakespeare alongside lesser known figures, this survey of almost 1000 years of writing from the British Isles provides a foundation for engaging with all kinds of literature. We will read everything from the earliest poetry in English to the drama of the seventeeenth century, heoric epics to science fiction, bawdy tales to pious meditations, love sonnets to allegorical romance. Along the way, we will focus on developing strategies for reading, appreciating, and interpreting a variety of premodern texts, both in their historical context and for what they can tell us about our own cultural moment. We will be attentive to both to the changing trends in literary writing over time and to the ways literature responded to the political, social, and religious contexts in which it was written. We will also consider the ways that we define ‘literature’ and the implications such definitions have on our objects of study.
This course has five main aims:
To introduce you to a selection of canonical and non-canonical texts written in Britain from the Middle Ages to the end of the seventeenth century.
To understand, identify, and appreciate the major genres, forms, styles, and languages that characterize early British literature.
To stimulate and enrich your ability to think critically and write skillfully about all areas of literature, with a particular emphasis on close reading and interpretation.
To situate your understanding of literature in history and literature’s relationship to history.
To recognize major literary figures and their works, and to understand their position within a longer history of literature in English.