ENGL 524

Spring 2019 All Classes

All Classes

Seminar in 17th C Literature

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Credit: 4 hours.

May be repeated if topics vary. Prerequisite: A college course devoted entirely to an aspect of Renaissance studies or consent of instructor.

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ENGL 524 class schedule data for spring 2019
	CRN	Type	Section	Time	Day	Location	Instructor	Section Details
	32264	Lecture-Discussion	R	1:00PM -2:50PM	T	135 English Building	Gray, C	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 01/14/19-05/01/19 Section Title: Milton Now Section Info: Milton Now Milton was a blind seer, regicidal prose-writer, and influential poet. He also wrote arguably the most ambitious English epic, one that aimed to explain the deep historical origins of human life while also addressing his war-torn contemporary moment, with all its political, affective, and spiritual turbulence. Milton grappled with some of the most controversial issues of his time, including divorce and tyrannicide, while also elaborating ideas that often sit uncomfortably together: he was a censor who argued for restraining censorship, a zealous anti-Catholic who argued for a limited liberty of conscience. He was known to his contemporaries as both the virginal and feminized “Lady of Christs” and the libertine “Milton the Divorcer” or “Milton the stallion.” This course will explore Milton’s prodigious, dense, and often contradictory output, starting with his early verse and polemical prose works published in the first half of the seventeenth century and spending much of the second half of the semester on reading Paradise Lost (1667). Throughout, we’ll situate his work within two main contexts. First, we’ll consider the armed turmoil of the mid-seventeenth-century, which raised pressing questions about state form and political rhetoric, sex-gender relations and identities, and the ethics and effects of violence. To do this, we’ll explore a handful of important seventeenth-century interlocutors for Milton, including the republicans Andrew Marvell and Lucy Hutchinson, the radical sectarian Anna Trapnel, and King Charles I himself. Second, we’ll read a smattering of scholarship by a range of Miltonists, focusing in particular on new scholars who bring a diverse array of methods to try to rethink how we understand this most canonical of authors. We’ll talk about historicism’s Milton but also eco-criticism’s Milton, feminism’s Milton, and queer Milton. Restriction(s): Restricted to Graduate - Urbana-Champaign.