ENGL 380-01, Getting a Handle on Literary History: Five Books 1550-1800, Fall 2012

Abstract

What is literary history, why is it important, and how does one go about studying it? In this course we‟ll consider these questions by studying five books – not “texts” – published in print between 1500 and 1800: Songs and Sonnets (1557), the volume that initiates modern lyric verse in English; Ben Jonson‟s Works (1616), the first collected edition of plays and poems by a living English dramatist; Milton‟s Poems (1645), which shows a major writer shaping the way he wants his poetry to be read and understood; The Spectator, the periodical written and published in 1711 and 1712 by Richard Steele and Joseph Addison, one of the most important guides to the enjoyment of literature and polite culture in our history, both in Britain and North America; and finally the volume that announced that radical change in writing and reading that we call “Romanticism”: Wordsworth and Coleridge‟s Lyrical Ballads (1798). With each of these we‟ll look at the complex history of how these books come into being; what manuscripts lie behind the printed editions; what kind of audience received them; and what influence they had on the development of our literary culture. This course will use original printed editions available through the electronic resources Early English Books Online and Eighteenth Century Collections Online; and many of the classes will be more workshop than lecture.