English 246D: Seventeenth-Century English Literature

An introduction to one of the great ages of English literature, focusing on works by Francis Bacon, John Donne, Ben Jonson, George Herbert, Thomas Hobbes, Andrew Marvell, Thomas Hobbes, John Milton, Robert Herrick, Lucy Hutchinson, Anne Halkett. We will discuss the relationship between literature and the court of James I, the explosion of pamphlet literature during the English civil war, the controversy over gender roles, the texts surrounding the regicide of Charles I, and the political, religious, and sexual radicalism of dissenting literary culture. We will also take up the question of the different ways in which Renaissance humanism and the literary culture of the Reformation contributed to the flowering of vernacular literature in seventeenth-century England. Secondary reading in Fish, Patterson, Cummings, Braden, Hutson, Lewalski, Strier, Whigham, Hill et al.