ENGL 341 - Studies in the Renaissance

Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)

In-depth study of selected Renaissance texts and the questions they raise about their context and interpretation.

Topic for 2021/22b: Sex and the City in 1600: Gender, Marriage, Family, and Sexuality in Early Modern London. This course explores everyday life in the rapidly expanding early modern metropolis of London at the turn of the 16th and 17th centuries. We pay special attention to religious, social, legal as well as informal control mechanisms that influenced issues of gender, marriage, and sexuality in various layers of London society. We anchor our investigations in a handful of plays by Beaumont, Chapman, Dekker, Ford, Jonson, Marston, Middleton, Rowley, and Shakespeare, but also explore other literary and non-literary texts. By situating our early modern texts in the cultural and historical contexts in which they were written and performed, we are able to appreciate the historical differences as well as the occasional continuities between early 17th century and early 21st century interpretations and representations regarding such basic cultural and social issues as citizenship, class and gender difference, political agency, race and ethnicity, urbanization, and subject-formation. Zoltán Márkus.

This course satisfies one of the two pre-1800 requirements for the English major.

One 2-hour period.

Course Format: CLS