This course is designed to familiarize students with representative texts of major English writers from the Beowulf poet to 1700 and to enable students to discuss the works they have read with a considerable degree of critical sophistication.

In this survey of almost 1000 years of literature written in the British Isles—from the earliest poetry in English to the writings of the late seventeenth century—we will read a range of forms, genres, and styles. From heroic epics to bawdy tales, allegorical romance to religious drama, love sonnets to pious meditations, the texts we cover will include some of the most famous works written in English as well as lesser-known writings. While the course will focus on developing strategies for reading, appreciating, and interpreting a variety of premodern texts, we will also be attentive to history, 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.