Spring 2008

E 374K • Elizabethan Poetry and Prose

Course Description

This course will survey the work of the major Renaissance poets Sidney and Shakespeare and some of their important predecessors and contemporaries. We'll explore the various English adaptations of lyric poetry, looking for two things: (1) some account of the sonnet form's astounding status as culture-wide two-hundred-year craze; and (2) the development of student close/reading skills.

Texts

Readings (tentative):
Sir Thomas Wyatt, selected poems
the Earl of Surrey, selected poems
Sir Philip Sidney, Astrophil and Stella (selected poems); "Ye Goteherd Gods"
George Gascoigne. The Adventures of Master F. J.
John Lyly, Euphues William Shakespeare, Sonnets (selected poems)

Books to be ordered (tentative):
Shakespeare, Wm. Sonnets. Cambridge
Sylvester, Richard (ed.). English 16th-Century Verse. Norton
Salzman, Paul (ed.). An Anthology of Elizabethan Prose Fiction. Penguin

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