English 246 - Spring, 2011

17th C. Literature

Class Information

Instructor: Dolan, Frances
CRN: 53204
Time: M 3:10-6:00
Location: 248 Voorhies
Breadth: Earlier British
Focus: Interdiscipline

Description

In this course, we will study literary production and consumption in England from 1630 to 1660. During these decades, words were understood to matter desperately. Milton, for instance, famously described London on the brink of civil war as a city full of busy “pens and heads, sitting by their studious lamps, musing, searching, revolving new notions and ideas . . . others as fast reading, trying all things, assenting to the force of reason and convincement.” Although these decades fall between the still-conventional literary periodizations of “Renaissance” and “Restoration,” they have attracted vibrant scholarship in recent decades. This course hopes to engage students who are interested in the intertwined histories of print, literary form, and political struggle, as well as those specifically interested in the seventeenth century.

We will begin by discussing a history written by a literary critic, Diane Purkiss’s The English Civil War. We will then move in chronological order, roughly, hoping to use chronology to create unsettling juxtapositions of genre, class alliance, and political affiliation. In the 1630’s, we will examine the controversies surrounding Charles I and Henrietta Maria including Walter Montague’s masque The Shepherd’s Paradise (1632), in which the queen and her ladies took speaking parts, Shirley’s play The Bird in a Cage (1633), which restages this masque, selections from William Prynne’s attack on women actors from Histriomastix (printed in 1632, for which he was brutally punished), Milton’s masque Comus (1634), poetry by John Donne and George Herbert, both of whom published collections in 1633, and selections from Charles and Henrietta Maria’s alleged correspondence, published as The King’s Cabinet Opened (printed in 1645) and The Queen’s Cabinet Opened (a royalist recipe book printed in 1655). We will then turn to the role of the printing press in the civil war and regicide, including works by Henry Parker (Observations, 1642), John Lilburne (England’s New Chains Discovered, 1649), women prophets and petitioners such as Elizabeth Poole, Katherine Chidley, and Anna Trapnel, and Gerard Winstanley (The True Levellers Standard Advanced, 1649). We will also read Milton’s Areopagitica (1644), Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1649), and Readie and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth (1660), as well as a pamphlet account of Charles’ trial and execution (in 1649). We will then read influential works from the 1650’s including Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651). As we go, we will read poems circulated or published in the 1640’s and 1650s by Herrick, Carew, Shirley, Suckling, Lovelace, Vaughan, Dryden, and Phillips. We will probably read selections from memoirs of the civil war, including Margaret Cavendish’s A True Account of My Birth and Breeding; Lucy Hutchinson’s Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson, and the Earl of Clarendon’s History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England. As we think about the printing press as a revolutionary information technology, we will also think about how electronic databases are transforming our study of this period. In addition to familiar databases (such as Early English Books Online), we will be using and evaluating digital editions of early newssheets (now available at http://www.bl.uk/collections/earlynewspapers.html); the Journal of the House of Commons (http://www.british-history.ac.uk/catalogue.aspx?type=2&gid=43); Richard Brome’s plays (http://www.hrionline.ac.uk/brome/); and radical writings now available on the internet as resources for political action today, whether as a history for “a land rights campaign for Britain” (the land is ours; http://www.tlio.org.uk/index.html) or as a “context” for Quakerism (the Street Corner Society; http://www.strecorsoc.org/world.html).

Grading

Students will write one short and one longer paper (which might be an expansion of the first paper). They will prepare an abstract of that longer paper as well. In the course of the quarter, students will also lead discussions, give short presentations, and engage in research exercises.

Many course materials will be available online or on smartsite. In addition I have ordered the books listed below.

Texts

English Civil War, Diane Purkiss
Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes
Milton's Poetry and Prose, Jason Rosenblatt, ed.
Seventeenth-Century British Poetry, John Rumrich and Gregory Chaplin, eds.
English Civil War, Diane Purkiss
Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes
Milton's Poetry and Prose, Jason Rosenblatt, ed.
Seventeenth-Century British Poetry, John Rumrich and Gregory Chaplin, eds.