Syllabus
Lectures:
1. Old and Middle English Poetry and Prose
2. Alliterative Revival, Geoffrey Chaucer
3. Renaissance Period - Background, Early and Mid- Renaissance
4. Elizabethan Period, Renaissance love poetry
5. English Renaissance Drama, William Shakespeare
6. Late Renaissance - Ben Jonson, John Donne
7. Civil War - John Milton and Others
8. Restoration Period - Drama and Prose
9. Eighteenth Century - Introduction and Poetry
10. The Rise of the Novel
11. The Development of the Novel, Late Classicism
12. Pre-Romantic Poetry Seminars:
1. Introduction
2. Beowulf (extract), The Dream of the Rood
3. Canterbury Tales (Prologue, Pardoner’s Tale)
4. Selected poems (Sidney, Ralegh, Marlowe, Spenser)
5. Shakespeare’s selected sonnets, John Donne’s selected poems
6. A Midsummer Night’s Dream
7. Hamlet
8. Richard Lovelace’s selected poems, Paradise Lost (extract)
9. Pilgrim’s Progress (extract)
10. Love for Love (extract), The Rape of the Lock (extract)
11. A Modest Proposal, Gulliver’s Travels (extract)
12. Robinson Crusoe (extract), Tristram Shandy (extract)
13. William Blake and Robert Burns (selected poems)
Annotation
The aim of this course is to introduce students to some major works of English literature from its earliest beginnings to the second half of the eighteenth century. The lectures are designed to offer a general historical, social and cultural context of the time when they were written.
The seminars deal with reading and analysis of the individual selected works.