English 232 - Winter, 2013

Problems in English Literature

Topic: Contested Crossings: Studies in the History of Sexuality, Gender, and Genre in the Early Modern Era

Class Information

Instructor: Ferguson, Margaret
CRN: 73748
Time: T 3:10-6:00
Location: 120 Voorhies
Focus: Genre, Method, Theory

Description

Enl 232 "Contested Crossings: Studies in the History of Sexuality, Gender, and Genre in Early Modern England"

The seminar focuses on cultural debates about category distinctions as they pertain both to genres of literary production and to representations of gender and sexuality in texts from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. We will pay particular attention to the ideological borders between virginity (male and female) and non-virginity; between marriage and divorce; between Catholic and Protestant (with a look at the category of "conversion" poem); between romance and epic; between translation and original; and between tragedy and comedy. Texts will include several major modern critical statements on genre and on translation; selections from Spenser's __Faerie Queene_; from Golding's translation of Ovid's _Metamorphoses_; plays and masques by Jonson; Middleton and Rowley; Shakespeare; Beaumont and Fletcher; Milton; Cavendish; and Behn; poetic texts by Skelton, Wyatt, Whitney, Wroth, Donne, Milton, and Marvell. Some primary and all secondary works on SmartSite--and in a hard copy reader if seminar members wish to read from print.

Grading

One pedagogical exercise of questions for one class (group project); a thesis atatement with preliminary bibliography for your seminar paper (approx 15 pp.); class participation.

Texts

The Changeling, Thomas Middleton and William Rowley (New Mermaid ed.)
The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol 1B (9th edition). !B is the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Century
The Faerie Queene Books Three and Four, Edmund Spenser, ed. Dorothy Stephens