ENGL 209

Fall 2024 All Classes

All Classes

Early British Literature and Culture

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Credit: 3 hours.

This course surveys more than a thousand years of British literature from the early Middle Ages through the Renaissance and well into the eighteenth century. But what does "British literature" really mean, especially in the context of an island archipelago populated by multiple nations (England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales) and repeatedly subjected to foreign rule (either by violent invasion or dynastic succession)? The range of texts we thus characterize as "early British literature" is staggering, and part of our goal in this course will simply be to appreciate the sheer volume and breadth of written work created in Britain and Ireland between the sixth and eighteenth centuries. We will do this through a necessarily selective sampling of historical periods, languages, and genres. Our authors will range from the famous (e.g., Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton) to the lesser-known (e.g., Marie de France, Lady Mary Wroth, and Eliza Haywood) to the unknown (e.g., the anonymous Beowulf-poet).

Prerequisite: Completion of the Composition I requirement and ENGL 200.

Students must register for one discussion and one lecture section.

This course satisfies the General Education Criteria in Fall 2022 for:

Humanities – Lit & Arts

Cultural Studies - Western

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ENGL 209 class schedule data for fall 2024
CRN	Type	Section	Time	Day	Location	Instructor	Section Details
33907	Discussion/ Recitation	AD1	10:00AM -10:50AM	F	113 English Building	Vowels, G	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 08/26/24-12/11/24 Degree Notes: Humanities - Lit & Arts, and Cultural Studies - Western course.
33909	Discussion/ Recitation	AD2	11:00AM -11:50AM	F	113 English Building	Vowels, G	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 08/26/24-12/11/24 Degree Notes: Humanities - Lit & Arts, and Cultural Studies - Western course.
41808	Discussion/ Recitation	AD3	12:00PM -12:50PM	F	123 English Building	Dawn, L	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 08/26/24-12/11/24 Degree Notes: Humanities - Lit & Arts, and Cultural Studies - Western course.
41809	Discussion/ Recitation	AD4	1:00PM -1:50PM	F	113 English Building	Dawn, L	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 08/26/24-12/11/24 Degree Notes: Humanities - Lit & Arts, and Cultural Studies - Western course.
33895	Lecture	AL1	1:00PM -1:50PM	MW	138 Henry Administration Bldg	Barrett, R	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 08/26/24-12/11/24 Degree Notes: Humanities - Lit & Arts, and Cultural Studies - Western course. Section Info: FA24 ENGL 209 - Early British Literature and Culture - Robert Barrett - This survey of early British literature begins in the marketplace of sixth-century Rome, where English boys are being sold as slaves, and ends in the eighteenth-century country house of the German-born Prince of Wales, where the finale of a patriotic opera insists that “Britons never will be slaves!” We will track this contradiction across the centuries, connecting it to the never-ending debate about who does and doesn’t count as “English” and/or “British.” Some of the questions we’ll ask over the course of the semester: why is Beowulf, a poem about Danes and Swedes, celebrated as the first English epic? How does Marie, a woman who writes French romance, end up on an English Department syllabus? Why does William Shakespeare transplant the Forest of Arden from his native Warwickshire to the foreign Ardennes in As You Like It? Is it a coincidence that Aphra Behn publishes Oroonoko (the story of a slave revolt in colonial Surinam) in 1688, the same year that the Dutch Prince of Orange invades England and seizes the throne?