English Renaissance Literature
Times
Monday 9 am - 11 am, Wednesday 10 am -11 am
Instructor
C. Warley
E-mail: chris.warley@utoronto.ca
Brief Description of Course
An introduction to Renaissance literature in English and to the many sorts of rebirths that literature, ever since, makes possible. The “Renaissance” in “Renaissance literature” usually refers to the “re-birth” of the Greek and Roman past in the sixteenth century. But only in the nineteenth century does “Renaissance” get used to describe this sixteenth-century rebirth. So: what sort of literature expresses a specific time and place (England, 1600) but exceeds that moment by reaching back to the past and by becoming reborn in the future? Our subject will be such conundrums and possibilities. Writers from around 1600 may include Petrarch, Wyatt, Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne, Jonson, Milton; from the classical past: Virgil, Catullus, Ovid, Augustine; from the 19th century: Ruskin, Michelet, Burckhardt, Pater.
Required Reading(s)
TBA
First Three Authors/Texts
TBA
Method of Evaluation
- Lecture
- Several short papers
- Term test.