Renaissance Literature: Texts and Contexts (ENGLM0037)

This unit will consider key Renaissance texts in relation to their wider historical context, exploring the complex ways in which literary works take up, critique, and are in dialogue with the cultural practices, debates, and technologies of their time. It will focus on: ideas about sexuality, gender, and the body on stage and in medical texts; early modern ideas about interiority; literary and cultural geography and the ways in which identity is seen to shape, and be shaped by, encounters with space and place.

The unit aims to give a broadened experience of the range and variety within Renaissance literature and its comparable textual cultures, as well as providing an insight into the current shape of Renaissance studies as a discipline. Students will learn to read literary texts historically, developing a strong sense of the ways in which literature works within its broader contexts. They will also learn to write critically about literary texts, and to develop their skills in close and interdisciplinary textual analysis.

TEXTS FOR PURCHASE

Middleton and Dekker, The Roaring Girl (any edition) William Rowley, Thomas Dekker and John Ford, The Witch of Edmonton (any edition) Beaumont and Fletcher, The Maid’s Tragedy (any edition) Anthony Parr (ed.), Three Renaissance Travel Plays (Manchester: MUP, 2000) (contains Brome, The Antipodes) Philip Massinger, The Renegado, ed. by Michael Neill (London: Methuen, 2010) Aphra Behn, Oroonoko (any edition; please note this is in the Norton Anthology of English Literature) Margaret Cavendish, The Blazing World and Other Writings, ed. Kate Lilley (London: Penguin, 1994)

COURSE SCHEDULE

Week 1 Introduction to Early Modern Literature: Gender, Performance, and Space (LD & TB) Extracts from a variety of texts

Week 2 Gender, Performance, & Desire 1: Roaring Girls and Witches (LD & ER) Middleton and Dekker, The Roaring Girl William Rowley, Thomas Dekker and John Ford, The Witch of Edmonton Judith Butler, ‘Imitation and Gender Insubordination’, in Henry Abelove, Michele Aina Barale, and David M. Halperin, (eds.), The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader (New York: Routledge, 1993). (Blackboard) Week 3 Gender, Performance, & Desire 2: Erotic Scripts (LD) Beaumont and Fletcher, The Maid’s Tragedy Extracts from Beaumont and Fletcher, The Mad Lover, Fletcher & Shakespeare, The Two Noble Kinsmen, Shakespeare, Twelfth Night

Week 4 Travel and Theatre (LP) Richard Brome, The Antipodes (in Three Renaissance Travel Plays, ed. Parr) Anthony Parr, Introduction to Three Renaissance Travel Plays (read the general introduction and the section on The Antipodes) Ben Jonson, ‘To William Roe’ Other extracts to be put on Blackboard (please bring them to the seminar)

Week 5 How to Write an Essay

Week 6 Reading Week

Week 7 Travel, Romance, and Selfhood (LP) Philip Massinger, The Renegado Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene Book 2, Canto XII Michael Neill, Introduction to The Renegado (read the whole introduction) Bernhard Klein, ‘Imaginary journeys: Spenser, Drayton, and the poetics of national space’, in Literature, Mapping, and the Politics of Space in Early Modern Britain, ed. by Andrew Gordon and Bernhard Klein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 204-223. (On Blackboard.)

Week 8 Travel, Spectacle & Desire 1: The Colonial Gaze (TB) Aphra Behn, Oroonoko & extracts from Spenser’s View and Ralegh’s Discoverie (the relevant extracts will be placed on Blackboard – please bring them to the seminar). Dickson, Vernon Guy, ‘Truth, Wonder, and Exemplarity in Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko’, Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, 47: 3 (Summer, 2007), pp. 573-594. Rivero, Albert J., ‘Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko and the “Blank Spaces” of Colonial Fictions’, Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, 39: 3 (Summer, 1999), pp. 443-462.

Week 9 Travel, Spectacle & Desire 2: Utopia and Making Worlds (TB) Margaret Cavendish, The Blazing World & extracts from More’s Utopia and Bacon’s New Atlantis (the relevant extracts will be placed on Blackboard – please bring them to the seminar). ‘Introduction’ to New Worlds Reflected, ed. Chloë Houston (Blackboard) Trubowitz, Rachel, ‘The Reenchantment of Utopia and the Female Monarchical Self: Margaret Cavendish’s Blazing World’, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, 11: 2 (Autumn, 1992), pp. 229-245. Week 10 Seminar Presentations

Weeks 11-12 Reading and Writing Weeks

CRITICAL BIBLIOGRAPHY

General Reading and References

The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. B: The Sixteenth Century and the Early Seventeenth Century, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 2012) The Penguin Book of Renaissance Verse, 1509-1659, intr. David Norbrook, ed. H.R. Woudhuysen (London: Penguin, 1992) Michael Hattaway, Renaissance and Reformations: An Introduction to Early Modern English Literature (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005) Malcolm Hebron, Key Concepts in Renaissance Literature (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) The Renaissance Literature Handbook, ed. Susan Bruce and Rebecca Steinberger (London: Continuum, 2010) Renaissance Literature and Culture, ed. Lisa Hopkins and Matthew Steggle (London: Continuum, 2006)