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Students may be unaccustomed to thinking about poetry, and in particular Elizabethan poetry, as ideological. This course will encourage its participants to do so in two ways. First, the forms of Elizabethan poetry will be viewed in relation to their social and political contexts of production; for example, Edmund Spenser's THE FAERIE QUEENE will be read in relation to the author's role in England's colonization of Ireland. Second, we will consider the process of selection and exclusion whereby the canon of Renaissance Poetry itself comes to be constituted (a process that begins in the 16th century). In so doing, we will read several female, nonaristocratic poets who were until recently excluded from the canon. The ideology of the canon is not onl y a question of inclusion/exclusion, however, but of how we choose to read canonical authors and genres. We will discover that even the most "innocent" of genres, such as pastoral, are themselves deeply politicized. We will also examine more explicitly political genres such as satire, and the poetry of the city, as well as the poetry of the court.
COURSE FORMAT: Discussion
Level: UGRD Credit: 1 Gen Ed Area Dept: HA ENGL Grading Mode: Graded
Prerequisites: ENGL201
Last Updated on MAR-24-2000
Copyright Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut, 06459