Literature Pre-1850 Spring 2027
ENGL 332: Shakespeare
Instructor: Jonathan Lamb
64664 | MW 2:00-3:15 PM | Wescoe 4020
In this course, we will read plays across Shakespeare’s career, including The Merchant of Venice, Love’s Labour’s Lost, Hamlet, Othello, and The Winter’s Tale. We will study these texts for their formal complexity, for their engagement with ideas in their historical moments and across time, for a sense of Shakespeare’s development as a dramatist and poet, and for an understanding of how such questions work with respect to performance and print publication. The ultimate goal will be to investigate how Shakespeare’s powerful imaginative worlds were created and made public. Our approaches will be as diverse as the works themselves, covering the whole spectrum of critical methodologies and engaging in all kinds of approaches to learning. Preparation, attendance, and participation are absolutely necessary. Written work will include several papers, two exams, and creative projects.
ENGL 520: History of the Book
Instructor: Jonathan Lamb
64668 | MW 3:30-4:45 PM | Spencer Research Library 350
What is, and was, the book? This course explores the history of the book in the West from the invention of the alphabet to the advent of the electronic book, with a particular emphasis on the printed book. We will investigate how changing material, technological, and social forces have shaped the production, circulation, and consumption of books. The class will meet at the Kenneth Spencer Research Library, where students will gain hands-on experience with books, ranging from medieval manuscripts to early printed books to nineteenth-century triple-decker novels to twentieth-century fine press titles. We may even smell the books. At a time when the concept of the book is changing, we will explore issues that producers and consumers of books have long confronted, such as the interplay of text and image, access and censorship, innovation and form, and aesthetics and economics. Course readings will include articles and essays on the history of authorship, book production, publication, distribution, and readership. Course requirements will include readings, various hands-on projects, three short, formal papers, and a final project.
ENGL 655: Victorian Literature: Victorian Fantasy
Instructor: Anna Neill
64670 | By appointment | Online (Jan 19-Mar 12)
The Victorians invented fantasy. They recovered and rewrote folk tales and medieval stories. They reenchanted weary modern lives with tales of fairies and goblins. They imagined marvelous new lands whose indigenous peoples could be brutally conquered. They mixed magical thinking with evolutionary science to create improbable beings or to predict outlandish planetary futures. And they imagined utopian possibilities that drew on the conventions of romance. Over the semester we will read a wide range of fantastic Victorian stories, considering how they reflect and comment on contemporary science, industrial capitalism, imperialism, and the many cultural upheavals caused by revolutions in technology and commerce. These writers are the precursors of C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and J.K. Rowling. If you love these 20th-century fantasy classics, you will enjoy learning about the stories, the histories, and the conflicted visions of past present and future worlds that the Victorians tried to navigate with the help of romance, myth, and magic. Texts: Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Idylls of the King; Christina Rossetti, Goblin Market; Charles Kingsley, The Water Babies; George MacDonald, The Princess and the Goblin; Marie Corelli, A Romance of Two Worlds;; H. Rider Haggard, King Solomon’s Mines; William Morris, News from Nowhere.
