ENGL 211
English Literature from 1000 to1600
Last Offered Spring 2018
Division I
This course is not offered in the current catalog

One of the oldest surviving works in English, Beowulf tells the story of a monster and his mom. In this class we will read key texts from the medieval and early modern periods, starting with Beowulf and ending with Shakespeare’s equally bloody Titus Andronicus. Other readings will include selections from The Canterbury Tales, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, sonnets by Sidney and Donne, and Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta. We will discuss the conflicting, often self-contradictory claims that writers in these periods made for the importance of literature and the anxieties that these new types of fiction generate–about sex, about God, about money. We will ask what it meant to read–and misread–before books were commonplace.