Elizabethan and Seventeenth-Century Poetry

• Credit value: 30 credits at Level 6
• Convenor: to be confirmed
• Assessment: unassessed coursework exercise (0%), a 2500-3000-word essay (50%) and a three-hour unseen examination (50%)

In this module we will survey a broad range of late-sixteenth- and seventeenth-century poetry in a variety of genres and with reference to various social, historical, political and cultural contexts.

Authors covered will include Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, Walter Raleigh, Fulke Greville, Michael Drayton, John Marston, George Chapman, John Donne, Ben Jonson, George Herbert, Aemilia Lanyer, Andrew Marvell and John Milton. Genres studied will include:

• the Elizabethan sonnet
• the religious lyric
• the Country House poem
• the Pastoral
• the Epithalamion
• verse satire
• the Elegy.

The poetry will be studied with a view to understanding sixteenth- and seventeenth-century attitudes towards poetics, religion, femininity and masculinity, sexuality, city life, court politics and philosophy.

By the end of this module, you will have gained an understanding, through the study of poetry, of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century attitudes towards poetics, religion, femininity and masculinity, sexuality, city life, court politics and philosophy.