Course description

What is the 'early modern'? As Stephen Greenblatt surmises, it was a period in which the world took a 'swerve' towards the modern. The Europeans 'discovered' the new world of the Americas; merchants became global adventurers; new technologies emerged; belief faltered and secular culture developed. Knowledge itself was newly negotiated as a process of discovery in which the learner possessed new agency and responsibility, and in which the role of 'imagination' as we recognise it today was effectively transformed. This course explores early modern British literature in these particular historical, cultural and intellectual contexts. It introduces students to works by key sixteenth- and seventeenth-century authors which may include Thomas More, Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, John Donne, Andrew Marvel, Shakespeare, Montaigne, Francis Bacon, Margaret Cavendish, and Aphra Behn; and asks what part Literature played in the dynamic exchange between old and new worlds that underpins our swerve towards the modern.

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