ENGL239: English Literature and the Continental Renaissance

Semester: 

Fall

Offered: 

2014

A study of English writers of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in relation to the international cultural movement of the European Renaissance, with an emphasis on changing attitudes towards the Renaissance project of reviving the classical past.  The first half of the semester follows the impact of Renaissance humanism on poetry, history, philology, semiotics, exegesis, and autobiography; the second half considers individual case studies of the ways in which English Renaissance writers assimilate and transform humanism’s aims, aspirations, and failures.