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Literatures of the Renaissance

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Course Type Course Code No. Of Credits
Discipline Core NSUS1EN202 4

Course Coordinator and Team:                   SES Faculty

Email of course coordinator:                       pcbabed@aud.ac.in 

Pre-requisites:                                               No

Course Description:

This course is designed to introduce the students to not just the literary and intellectual history of the age through Canonical works and dominant writers of the time, but also help them to understand the important linkages of the arts with literature. The Renaissance characterises ‘the revival’ of classical learning, reforms in religion, opening up of a new world and certain events in history, Science and Technology.

Course Objectives:

  • Students will be able to understand the changes the Renaissance witnessed and also understand the repercussions of these changes in the history of humankind.
  • Students will be able to familiarize themselves with the poetic forms , the interface between politics and literature, the relationship between arts and literature and the beginnings of English Drama.

Course Outcomes:

  • The students can familiarise themselves with some representative features of the Renaissance age and the ideas that influenced the literary works
  • They can critically engage not only with the literary but also the artistic and cultural influences that shaped the age.

Brief description of the modules:

Module One: Introduction

The module will introduce the Renaissance through Hans Holbein’s painting The Ambassadors. Some of the key concepts and issues that will be discussed are:

  • Periodisation and the idea of Renaissance
  • Beginnings of Renaissance via art
  • Political history of the period
  • English Reformation

Module Two: Poetry

This module will study the development and growth of the dominant poetic form of the age, the Sonnet as well as other lyric forms through the works of representative poets. It will also discuss the nature of courtly and love poetry written during the Renaissance.

  • Sonnets by Petrarch (translated by Thomas Wyatt): “The Long Love That in My Thought Doth Harbor”; “My Galley”
  • Thomas Wyatt: “Farewell Love”;“Whoso list to hunt”
  • Philip Sidney, Any three sonnets from Astrophil and Stella (Sonnet I, XV, XXVII, XXXIV, XLI, XLV, II, V, XXXVIII, CVII)
  • Edmund Spenser, Selections from Amoretti (34 and 67)
  • Shakespeare: Sonnets 55, 130, 147
  • Michelangelo: “To Giorgio Vasari: On the Lives of the Painters”
  • John Donne, selections of any three sonnets ( Elegie: To his Mistress Going to Bed, The Flea, The Autumnal, The Sun Rising, The Canonisation, Hymn to God my God, in My Sickenesse, Batter My Heart, Three-Person’d God, Death Be Not Proud)
  • Andrew Marvell: “To His Coy Mistress”
  • Lady Mary Wroth, any three sonnets from Pamphilia to Amphilanthus nos. 1, 16, 39, 68, 103

Module Three: Drama

This module will introduce students to the rise and development of English theatre. It will discuss the dominant influences, directions and playwrights of the stage in the Elizabethan and Jacobean age. The course will include any two plays from the following list for classroom discussion.

  • Christopher Marlowe: Dr. Faustus
  • Shakespeare: The Tempest
  • John Webster: The Duchess of Malfi
  • Elizabeth Carey: Tragedy of Mariam

Module Four: Prose

This module will take up brief selections from some of the important social and political writings of the time which are reflective of the intellectual thought prevalent during the time.

  • Thomas More, Selections from Utopia
  • Machiavelli, Selections from the Prince.
  • Pico della Mirandola, Selections from Oration on the Dignity of Man
  • Baldassare Castiglione’s The Courtier

Assessment Plan

S.No

Assessment

Weightage

1

Individual project/ assignment

50%

2

End-Semester Examination

50%

References

  • Greenblatt, Stephen. Renaissance Self-Fashioning: from More to Shakespeare. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.
  • Dollimore, Jonathan. Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology, and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984.
  • Spiller, Michael R. G. The Development of the Sonnet: An Introduction. London: Routledge, 1992.
  • Lever, J W. Sonnets of the English Renaissance. London: Athlone Press, 1974.
  • Belsey, Catherine. The Subject of Tragedy (Routledge Revivals): Identity and Difference in Renaissance Drama. Hoboken: Taylor and Francis, 2014.
  • Loewenstein, David, and Janel Mueller. The Cambridge History of Early Modern English Literature
  • Loomba, Ania. “Playing with Shakespeare.” Shakespeare, Race and Colonialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002
  • Keenan, Siobhan. Renaissance Literature: Edinburgh Critical Guides. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008
  • Hattaway, Michael. Ed. A Companion to English Renaissance Literature and Culture. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003.
  • Bruce, Susan and Rebecca Steinberger. Eds. The Renaissance Literature Handbook. London: Continuum, 2009
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