British Literature I: A Story of Reading
In this course we will investigate how early conceptions of reading contributed to the formation of English Literature. Today, we may see literary reading as innocuous, private perusal of written words. Reading in pre-modern and early modern England meant far more. Authors often considered themselves interpreters of other texts, as much as creators of their own. Reading tended to happen aloud, communally, often with profound religious and political implications. Even staged drama could as public reading. The world itself found representation as allegorical text, and living in it as a kind of reading. What can we learn from such senses of reading? How did they help form the literary “canon”? How do they still haunt us? Authors may include Vergil, the Beowulf poet, the Gawain Poet, Marie de France, Chrétien, Chaucer, Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, Lanier, Donne, Jonson, Wroth, Cavendish, Milton, and others.