Renaissance Literature

Course details

• (Year 2, Semester 1)
• Credits: 20
• Convenor: Professor Martin Dzelzainis
• Course code: EN2020

Module Aims

The module aims to introduce you to a variety of (non-dramatic) genres and to authors writing in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It covers a longer period than EN1050 'Renaissance Drama: Shakespeare and his Contemporaries' and will therefore set your existing knowledge of Renaissance drama within a wider context. You will become familiar with some of the following literary genres and modes of writing:

• the sonnet;
• the epic poem;
• 'metaphysical' poetry;
• satire;
• political allegory;
• philosophical writing;
• travel writing;
• radical writing.

Since most texts written and published in the Renaissance were either religious or at least informed by the controversies that followed the Reformation, a substantial part of the module is designed to help you grasp the impact of religion and politics on the literature of the period. The module places special emphasis on the "material" dimension of the Renaissance, including the movement of people and ideas, theories of matter, conceptions of the body, sense of place, the physical features of texts, and the business of writing.

Content

The core texts for this module are Books 1, 2, 4 and 9 of Paradise Lost (though you are expected to read the entire poem), Shakespeare's Sonnets and Thomas More's Utopia. These texts will be complemented by your seminar tutor's selection of texts from the Norton anthology (ninth edition). 

Learning and teaching

Teaching for this module consists of a combination of lectures and seminars.  Students are encouraged to read independently and in seminars may be required to hand in written assignments and give oral presentations, which are designed as mechanisms that shape the learning of students and their ability to articulate ideas clearly and adopt an analytical attitude towards literature.

Learning outcomes

By the end of the module, you will be able to...

• recognise the breadth of Renaissance literature and set Renaissance drama within its wider literary and cultural context;
• provide an analysis of Renaissance texts that includes a consideration of the major political, social, literary and religious factors which had an impact on the literature;
• distinguish between a number of literary forms and between the styles of several authors using the same form.

Assessment

The assessment for this module consists of one 3000-word essay to be handed in by 12 noon on Tuesday 15 January, 2013 (100%).

Reading list

Set text

The texts for the course are chosen from a wide selection provided by The Norton Anthology of English Literature: Volume 1 (A, B, and C), ninth edition, ed. Stephen Greenblatt, et. al (2012). The anthology is in the form of a single paperback or a 3-volume set (A, B, and C) that can be bought as a set or individually. This module requires volume B: 16th and Early 17th Centuries. This will allow you to delve more deeply into the works of authors you particularly enjoy while giving you a generous overview of non-dramatic Renaissance literature. You are strongly encouraged to read as widely as you can.

(Note that a student taking EN2020 in the Autumn will also take EN2050 in the Spring, and even though Volume C (Restoration and Eigtheenth Century Literature) is not a required purchase for EN2050, it does include several very useful texts that you might otherwise have to acquite separately. It is cheaper to buy B and C together as part of the three-volume set than separately.)

Primary Contextual Reading

Classical Greek and Latin literature was highly influential during the Renaissance, and often cited by the authors we study for this module.  Continental, particularly Italian, philosophy also helped to shape the literature of the English Renaissance.  To learn more about these key influences on Renaissance literature, you might like to consult the following translations:

• Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier (Italian social philosophy) (Penguin Classics)
• Erasmus, In Praise of Folly (Latin satire) (Yale University Press)
• Homer, The Iliad (Greek epic poem) (Penguin Classics)
• Ovid, Metamorphoses (Latin epic poem) (Penguin Classics)
• Juvenal, The Satires (Latin satire) (Penguin Classics)
• Machiavelli, The Prince (Italian political philosophy) (Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought)
• Virgil, The Aeneid  (Latin epic poem) and The Eclogues (Latin pastoral poems) (Penguin Classics)

Secondary Reading

Good introductions to individual authors and to the period can be found in the Cambridge Companions series, which includes ‘Writings of the English Revolution’, ‘English Literature (1500-1600)’, ‘English Poetry (from Donne to Marvell)’, ‘Marvell’, ‘Renaissance Humanism’, ‘Jonson’, ‘Milton’, ‘Shakespeare’ and ‘Spenser’. 

General literary and historical contexts

• Elaine V. Beilin  Redeeming Eve: Women Writers of the English Renaissance, (1989) 
• Gordon Braden, Petrarchan Love and the Continental Renaissance (1999)
• Kenneth Charlton, Education in Renaissance England (1965)
• Sukanta Chaudhuri, Renaissance Pastoral and its English Development (1989)
• Danielle Clarke, ed., “This Double Voice”: Gendered Writing in Early Modern England (2000)
• Patrick Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (1967)
• Thomas N. Corns, The Cambridge Companion to English Poetry: Donne to Marvell (1993)
• James Doelman, ‘The Accession of King James I and English Religious Poetry’, Studies in English Literature 34 (No.1) (Winter 1994), pp. 19-40
• James Doelman, King James I and the Religious Culture of England (2000)
• Anthony Esler, The Aspiring Mind of the Elizabethan Younger Generation (1966)
• Alaistair Fox, The English Renaissance: Identity and Representation in Elizabethan England (1997)
• Patricia Fumerton, Cultural Aesthetics (1999)
• Jonathan Goldberg, James I and the Politics of Literature: Jonson, Shakespeare, Donne and Their Contemporaries (1989)
• Stephen Greenblatt, New World Encounters (1993) – available via the Library website as an e-book
• Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: from More to Shakespeare (1982)
• Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the Renaissance Began (2011); republished in paperback as The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (2012)
• Gerald Hammond, Fleeting Things: English Poets and Poems, 1616-1660 (1990)
• Michael Hattaway (ed.), A Companion to English Renaissance Literature and Culture (2000)
• Michael Hattaway, Renaissance and Reformations: An Introduction to Early Modern English Literature (2005)
• Thomas Healy, New Latitudes: Theory of English Renaissance Literature (1992)
• Richard Helgerson, The Elizabethan Prodigals (1976)
• Christopher Hill, Economic Problems of the Church: from Archbishop Whitgift to the Long Parliament (1956)
• Christopher Hill, Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution Revisited  (1997)
• Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution (1972)
• Wilbur Samuel Howell, Logic and Rhetoric in England, 1500-1700 (1956)
• Constance Jordan, Renaissance feminism: literary texts and political models (1994) 
• William Kerrigan, ‘The Articulation of the Ego in the English Renaissance’ in The Literary Freud: Mechanisms of Defense and the Poetic Will, ed. Joseph H. Smith (1980), pp. 261-308 (1996)
• Mark Kishlansky, A Monarchy Transformed: Britain 1603-1714 (1996)
• Jill Kraye, Humanism and Early Modern Philosophy (2000) – accessible as an e-book via the Library website
• Barbara K. Lewalski, Writing Women in Jacobean England (1993)
• Stephen May, Elizabethan Courtier Poets: Their Poems and Their Contexts (1991)
• Carla Mazzio, ed., Historicism, Psychoanalysis and the Making of Early Modern Culture (2000) 
• Nicholas McDowell, The English Radical Imagination: Cultural, Religion, and Revolution, 1630-1660  (2003)
• Andrew McRae  Literature, Satire, and the Early Stuart State  (2004)
• E.H. Miller, The Professional Writer in Elizabethan England (1959)
• David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics, 1627-1660 (1999)
• Patricia Parker and David Quint (eds.), Literary theory/Renaissance texts (1986) 
• Graham Parry, The Seventeenth Century: The Intellectual and Cultural Context of English Literature (1989)
• Roger Pooley, English Prose of the Seventeenth Century, 1590-1700 (1992)
• David Quint, Origin and originality in Renaissance literature: versions of the source (1983) 
• Neil Rhodes, Elizabethan Grotesque (1980)
• Isabel Rivers, Classical and Christian Ideas in English Renaissance Poetry
• Jason Scott-Warren, Early Modern English Literature (2005)
• Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker, eds., Politics of Discourse: The Literature and History of Seventeenth-Century England (1987) 
• Debora Kuller Shuger, Sacred Rhetoric, The Christian Grand Style in the English Renaissance (1988)
• Debora Kuller Shuger, Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance: Religion, Politics, and the Dominant Culture (1997)
• Lawrence Stone, ‘The Educational Revolution in England 1560-1640’, Past and Present 28 (1964), pp. 41-80 
• Claude J. Summers, Fault lines and Controversies in the Study of Seventeenth-Century English Literature (2002) – available as an e-book via the Library website
• Greg Walker, Writing Under Tyranny: English Literature and the Henrician Reformation (2005)
• Christopher Warley, Sonnet Sequences and Social Distinction in Renaissance England (2001)
• William Zunder and Suzanne Trill, eds., Writing and the English Renaissance (1996)

Individual author bibliographies

Bibliographies for the authors of this module’s set texts (Milton; More; Shakespeare) can be found below; other author bibliographies can be found on the ‘Renaissance Literature’ module site on Blackboard under ‘Course Documents’

John Milton

• David Armitage, Armand Himy and Quentin Skinner (eds), Milton and Republicanism (1995)
• Sharon Achinstein, Milton and the Revolutionary Reader (1994)
• Catherine Belsey, John Milton: language, gender, power (1988)
• Francis Blessington, Paradise Lost and the classical epic(1979)
• Colin Burrow, Epic Romance: Homer to Milton (1993)
• Thomas N. Corns, A Companion to Milton (2001)
• Dennis Danielson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Milton (second edition) (1999)
• Robert Thomas Fallon, Divided Empire: Milton’s political imagery (1995)
• Anne Ferry, ‘Milton’s Creation of Eve’, Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, 28(1), (1988) 
• Stanley Fish, Surprise by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost (1967)
• Clarence Green, ‘The Paradox of the Fall in Paradise Lost’, Modern Language Notes, 53 (1938)
• Achsah Guibbory, Ceremony and Community from Herbert to Milton: Literature, Religion, and Cultural Conflict in Seventeenth-Century England (1998) – available via the Library website as an e-book
• Paul Hammond and Blair Worden (eds), John Milton: Life, Writing, Reputation (2010)
• William Kerrigan and Gordon Braden ‘Milton’s Coy Eve: Paradise Lost and Renaissance Love Poetry’, English Literary History, 53 (1986), pp. 27-51 – available via the Library website via JSTOR
• Barbara Lewalski, The Life of John Milton: A Critical Biography (2000) – chiefly chapters 12 & 13
• David A. Loewenstein, ‘Areopagitica and the Dynamics of History’, Studies in English Literature 28 (1999): 77-93
• Dianne McColley, ‘Shape of  Things Divine: Eve and Myth in Paradise Lost’, Sixteenth Century 9 (1978)
• Nicholas McDowell and Nigel Smith (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Milton (2009)
• Charles Martindale, John Milton and the Transformation of the Ancient Epic (1986)
• David Norbrook, Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance – chapter 10 (Milton’s early poetry) 
•  C.A. Patrides, Milton and the Christian Tradition (1966)
• Annabel Patterson, John Milton (1992)
• David Quint, Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton (1993)
• Barbara Riebling, ‘Milton on Machiavelli: Representations of the State in Paradise Lost’, Renaissance Quarterly 49 (1996), pp. 573-597 – also available via the Library website via JSTOR
• John Rogers, The Matter of Revolution: Science, Poetry, and Politics in the Age of Milton (1996)
• Paul Siegel, ‘Milton and the Humanist Attitude towards Women’, Journal of the History of Ideas 11 (1950)
• Thomas O. Sloane, Donne, Milton, and the End of Humanist Rhetoric (1985)
• Balir Worden, Literature and Politics in Cromwellian England. John Milton, Andrew Marvell, Marchamont Nedham (2007)
• Ward Worden, ‘Milton’s Approach to the Story of the Fall’, English Literary History 15 (1948)

Thomas More

• Peter Ackroyd, The Life of Sir Thomas More (1998)
• W.E. Campbell, More’s Utopia and his Social Teaching (1946)
• A.D. Cousins, More’s Utopia and the Utopian Inheritance (1995)
• J.C. Davis, Utopia and the Ideal Society: a Study of English Utopian Writing (1981)
• Alistair Fox, Thomas More: History and Providence (1982)
• Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning from More to Shakespeare, (1980) (Chapter 1)
• John Guy, Thomas More (2000)
• J.H. Hexter, More’s ‘Utopia’: The Biography of an Idea (1976)
• Robbin S. Johnson, More’s ‘Utopia’: Ideal and Illusion (1968)
• Emrys Jones, ‘Commoners and Kings: Book I of More’s Utopia’, in Medieval Studies for J.A.W. Bennett, ed. P.L. Heyworth (1981), pp. 255-72 
• George Logan, The Meaning of  More’s Utopia (1983)
• Eric Nelson, ‘Greek Nonsense in More’s Utopia’, The Historical Journal 44.4 (2001), pp. 899-917 – in  JSTOR.
• David Norbrook, Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance (2002) (Chapter 1)
• John C. Olin, Interpreting Thomas More’s Utopia (1989)
• William Roper, The Life of Sir Thomas More – the first biography of More, written by his son-in-law and published in 1626.  Available in a number of twentieth-century editions
• Quentin Skinner, ‘Sir Thomas More’s Utopia and the language of Renaissance humanism’, in Anthony Pagden (ed.), The Languages of Political Theory in Early-Modern Europe (1987)
• Greg Walker, Persuasive Fictions: Faction, Faith, and Political Culture in the Reign of Henry VIII (1996)
• Hanan Yoran, ‘More’s Utopia and Erasmus’ No-Place’, English Literary Renaissance 35 (March 2005), pp. 3-30 – available via the Library website

William Shakespeare

• Stephen Booth, An Essay on Shakespeare’s Sonnets (1969)
• Patrick Cheney, Shakespeare, National Poet-Playwright (2004)
• Crosman, Robert, ‘Making love out of nothing at all: The issue of story in Shakespeare’s procreation sonnets’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 41, no. 4 (1990), pp. 470-88 – accessible via the Library website via JSTOR
• Heather Dubrow, ‘“Incertainties now crown themselves assur’d”: The Politics of Plotting Shakespeare’s Sonnets’, Shakespeare Quarterly 47.3 (1996), 291-305 – accessible via the Library website via JSTOR
• Richard Dutton, and Jean E. Howard (eds.), A Companion to Shakespeare’s Works, vol. 4 (2005)
• Anne Ferry, The “Inward” language: Sonnets of Wyatt, Sidney, Shakespeare, Donne (1983)
• G.K. Hunter, ‘The Dramatic Technique of Shakespeare’s Sonnets’, Essays in Criticism 3.2 (1953), pp. 152-64 – accessible via the Library website via JSTOR or the library catalogue
• Peter Hyland, An Introduction to Shakespeare’s Poems (2003)
• Paul Innes, Shakespeare and the English Renaissance Sonnet (1997)
• Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985)
• Stephen May, Elizabethan Courtier Poets: Their Poems And Their Contexts (1999)
• James Schiffer (ed.), Shakespeare’s Sonnets: Critical Essays (2000)
• Bruce R. Smith, Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare’s England, (1994) (Chapter 7) 
• Helen Vendler, The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (1997)
• Christopher Warley, Sonnet Sequences And Social Distinction In Renaissance England (2005)
• Gerald Willen and Victor B. Reed (eds.), A Casebook on Shakespeare’s Sonnets (1964)

Periodicals

Journals such as English Literary Renaissance, English Literary History, and Milton Quarterly are in the library and/or accessible via the library website.  Visit the Digital Library website to search via the JSTOR or MLA databases for secondary material on specific authors and texts; consult your seminar tutor for further bibliographical suggestions.

E-books

We also recommend that you consult the Early English Books Online database for digital reproductions of the original printed texts: go to http://www.le.ac.uk/library/digital/e.html.

Lectures - Check blackboard for times, dates and venues

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