WGSS 390
Donne, Shakespeare, and Wroth
Last Offered Spring 2014
Division I Writing Skills
Cross-listed ENGL 390
This course is not offered in the current catalog

“Wit! Wonder-exciting vigour, intenseness and peculiarity of thought,” Samuel Coleridge wrote, “this is the wit of Donne!” There are no greater, wittier, or more daringly original lyric poems in the English language than Donne’s Songs and Sonnets, Shakespeare’s Sonnets, or Mary Wroth’s Pamphilia to Amphilathus, the first collection of secular poems written and published by an Englishwoman. This tutorial will explore the following questions. What are these writers’ stylistic characteristics? How peculiar or unconventional are these poems, and what innovations do they seek? What is the impact of their coterie audience? How do questions of sexuality and gender animate these poems? To what extent are biography and history pertinent or helpful in understanding this poetry? Why have these poems inspired such provocative critical responses from modernists, and more recently, post-modernists and gender studies?