Historical survey of literature in English: Beginnings through Milton.

This course will introduce students to Geoffrey Chaucer, Marie de France, Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe, John Donne, John Milton, and Aphra Behn; to literary history as a mode of inquiry; and to the analysis of the way literature makes meaning, produces emotional experience, and shapes the way human beings think about desire, commerce, liberty, God, power, the environment, subjectivity, empire, justice, death, and science. We will study how literary texts emerge out of authors’ readings of their predecessors and in relation to contemporary political, religious, social, and scientific discourses and events. Requirements: two short exercises in literary analysis; an in-person midterm; and an in-person final exam.

Book List

Aphra Behn, The Rover; Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales; John Milton, Paradise Lost; Shakespeare, The Tempest. Other texts will be available on bCourses.

Credit Restrictions

Students will receive no credit for ENGLISH 45A after completing ENGLISH 46A.

Repeat Rules

Course is not repeatable for credit.

Requirements class fulfills