- Trainer/in: Devani Mandira Singh
The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries represent an unprecedented era of English travel, exploration and colonization, and the literature of the period reflects this quest for global influence. In this seminar, we will read a variety of early modern texts which evoke and engage with England's imperial project and especially its efforts in the New World: the utopian vision in Bacon's New Atlantis, dramatic interpretations in William Shakespeare's The Tempest and Aphra Behn's The Widow Ranter, travel writing by Walter Raleigh and Richard Hakluyt, and selections from poets including from Edmund Spenser, John Donne, and Andrew Marvell. Throughout the course, we will closely study the literary representation of these new worlds alongside the vectors of gender, race, geography, class, and nationhood which animate them.
Course texts: Students are asked to purchase William Shakespeare, The Tempest, ed. Alden T. Vaughan and Virginia Mason Vaughan, 1st ed. (London: Bloomsbury, 2011), ISBN: 9781408133477 . All other texts will be available on Moodle.