Introductory description

EN3K5-15 Literature and Revolution 1640-1660: Turning the World Upside Down

Module web page

Module aims

Outline syllabus

This is an indicative module outline only to give an indication of the sort of topics that may be covered. Actual sessions held may differ.

Week 1: England on the Edge: William Davenant, Salmacida Spolia (1640) and Richard Brome, A Jovial Crew (1641).
Week 2: Print and Politics: John Milton, Aereopagitica (1644).
Week 3: The Old Country and the New: Anne Bradstreet, poems from The Tenth Muse (1650). Week 4: Leveller Literature: William Walwyn, The Bloody Project (1648), Alexander Brome, 'The Levellers Rant'.
Week 5: Debating the Regicide: extracts from Eikon Basilike and Eikonoklastes (both 1649); royalist elegy and drama.
Week 7: Early Modern Communism: Gerrard Winstanley, The True Levellers Standard (1650); Digger ballads and poetry.
Week 8: Gender and Prophecy: Anna Trapnel, The Cry of a Stone (1654); extracts from Thomas Edwards, Gangraena (1646).
Week 9: Republican and Protectoral Culture: Marvell, The First Anniversary (1654) and Elegy on the Death of the Lord Protector (1658); anti-Cromwellian satire.
Week 10: History and Memory: Dryden, Astraea Redux (1660); extracts from Lucy Hutchinson, Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson (1660s).

Learning outcomes

By the end of the module, students should be able to:

• Demonstrate a detailed knowledge of the set texts on the module and a nuanced understanding of the specific cultural, political, and intellectual contexts that informed their production.
• Recognise the imaginative techniques and rhetorical strategies used in non-literary texts like political pamphlets and prose prophecies, and distinguish how poetic and dramatic texts connect to and depart from non-literary texts in their style and presentation.
• Research, describe, and engage with current literary critical and historical scholarship on the middle decades of the 17th century, and draw these different disciplinary perspectives into their own arguments about the texts on the module.
• Analyse a range of literary and non-literary texts in their contexts and be able to communicate this analysis clearly and articulately.
• Show ability to manage their own learning and to develop own research-led perspectives on the period's writing by designing research questions and topics for the assessment.

Indicative reading list

The Broadview Anthology of Seventeenth-Century Verse and Prose (2000)
Peter Davidson, ed. Poetry and Revolution: An Anthology of British and Irish Verse (1999)
Laura Knoppers ed. The Oxford Handbook of the Literature of the English Revolution (2012)
Michael Braddick, ed. The Oxford Handbook of the English Revolution (2015)
Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down (1972)
Nigel Smith, Literature and Revolution (1994)
David Cressy, England on the Edge, 1640-42 (2000)
Elizabeth Scott-Baumann and Sarah Ross, ed. Women Poets of the Civil War (2017)
Rachel Foxley, The Levellers: Radical Political Thought (2014)
Nicholas McDowell, The English Radical Imagination (2003)
Robert Wilcher, The Writing of Royalism (2001)
Laura Knoppers, Constructing Cromwell (2000)
Janet Clare ed., From Republic to Restoration (2018)
Kate Chedgzoy, Women's Writing in the British Atlantic World (2007)
Anne Hughes, Gender in the English Revolution (2012)

Subject specific skills

No subject specific skills defined for this module.

Transferable skills

No transferable skills defined for this module.