Course overview and aims

This course covers one of the most innovative periods in English literary history, from 1520 to 1625. It is an era of remarkable inventiveness and experimentation and, beyond producing Shakespeare (who has his own paper), flaunts an embarrassment of forms and genres: in poetry, sonnets, pastoral, epic romance, elegies, epyllia, and epigrams; in drama, Elizabethan revenge tragedy, Jacobean tragicomedy, domestic tragedy, city comedy, and masques; and in prose, utopian literature and travel writing, sermons and satires, scientific and philosophical writing, letters and diaries, rogue literature, the essay, romances, novellas, and proto-novels. Reflecting this range, the course is structured – through a combination of lectures and seminars – to give students the opportunity in the Autumn to study four major works in depth, and a critical toolkit in the Spring to pursue their own interests more freely across the period's literary landscape. By the end of the course, students should feel that they have developed substantial knowledge of the four Autumn set texts; have a good grasp on some of the period's other authors in their intellectual and historical contexts; and have increased their familiarity with some of the key topics and new critical approaches in Renaissance studies.

Term 1 seminars and lectures

Autumn seminars address four set works which represent the period's four major genres, and which will be assessed in Section A of the summer exam. They are:

1. Lyric poetry: Thomas Wyatt & Henry Howard, Tottel’s Miscellany

2. Prose fiction: Sir Philip Sidney, The Old Arcadia

3. Epic: Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene (Book 3 only)

4. Drama: John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi

Autumn lectures address these four set texts as well as major themes, genres, and contexts from the period as a whole, allowing students to understand how these works fit into the period’s literary and intellectual practices more broadly.

Term 2 seminars and lectures

Spring seminars offer opportunities for lecturers to share their specialist interests, and for students to develop areas of personal expertise. Themes in recent years have included: Renaissance literature and the body; Renaissance doubt and scepticism; magic and the supernatural in the Renaissance; Renaissance literature and memory, subjectivity, and emotion; Renaissance law and literature; Renaissance prose experimentation. Spring lectures cover a range of authors in relation to a particular genre or topic, in roughly chronological order. Some of these lectures will relate to texts and critical approaches discussed in the Spring seminars; all of them will offer students readings in and critical inroads into the literature of the period 1520–1625. Topics and materials covered in Spring lectures and seminars will be assessed in Section B of the summer exam.

Recommended Reading

A lecture list specifying the titles and running order of Autumn and Spring lectures is available on Moodle or from the convenor, along with a general reading list which details recommended editions of the four set texts and offers suggestions for wider reading. Further recommended reading may be given in lectures and seminars too.

Assessment

Examination is by means of an exam paper, or by Course Essay if preferred and if no other Course Essay is being submitted by the candidate in that year. Exam descriptions, exams guidance, and examiners' reports can all be found on the UCL English Department webpage, and past examination papers for the Renaissance course can be found on the Renaissance Moodle page.