English 302-001
Survey of English Literature, 1500-1660
Instr: Kennedy, Gwynne
Office: CRT 494; 229-6402
e-mail: gkennedy@uwm.edu
Office hours: TBA
Course Information: TR; 9:30-10:45am; CRT 124
Course Description
This course offers a general introduction to the literature of early modern England, from Thomas More's Utopia to John Milton's Paradise Lost. We will read a diverse array of genres: plays, sonnets, essays, advice literature, travel narratives, and many kinds of poems. Among the readings will be the first play in English by a woman (Elizabeth Cary's The Tragedy of Mariam,) and some of Mary Sidney Herbert's psalm translations, which had a major influence on John Donne and George Herbert. Writers include, among others: Thomas More, Thomas Wyatt, Philip Sidney, Mary Wroth, Mary Sidney Herbert, Amelia Lanyer, John Donne, Ben Jonson, Christopher Marlowe, George Herbert, Thomas Hobbes, James I, Elizabeth I, John Milton, Edmund Spenser, Elizabeth Cary, Walter Raleigh, and Katherine Phillips.
The course also provides a context for further study of this period (e.g. Shakespeare) as well as adjacent ones (medieval, later 17th and 18th centuries, colonial America). Writing assignments are designed to enhance close reading skills and the practice of literary analysis and to refine students' abilities to assess critical positions and incorporate them into an original argument.
There will be a series of short responses throughout the semester, several short papers (critical summary, literary analysis), mid-term and final exam.
