Introductory description

EN3B5-30 Seventeenth-Century Literature

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.

Autumn Term
Week 1: Introduction and John Donne

• Donne’s religious poetry, including ‘Satire III’ and a selection of Holy Sonnets.
  Week 2: George Herbert
• Selections of Herbert’s religious verse
  Week 3: Country House Poems
• Ben Jonson, 'To Penshurst'; Aemelia Lanyer, 'The Description of Cookham' to be read alongside Francis Bacon's essays 'Of Gardens' and 'Of Building'
  Week 4: Jacobean Court Masques
• Ben Jonson, ‘The Masque of Blackness’ and ‘The Masque of Queens’
  Week 5: John Webster, The White Devil
  READING WEEK
  Week 7: James Shirley, The Bird in a Cage
  Week 8: Cavalier Poets:
• Selections of poems by Robert Herrick, Thomas Carew and Richard Lovelace.
  Week 9: Early Milton
• Poems from the 1645 collection, principally ‘L’Allegro’, ‘Il Penseroso’, ‘Lycidas’ and ‘A Maske Presented at Ludlow Castle’
  Week 10: Andrew Marvell
• Selections of Marvell’s early lyric poetry, plus ‘An Horatian Ode’
  Spring Term
  Week 1: The Renaissance Essay
• Essays by Francis Bacon and Michel Montaigne
  Week 2: Spiritual Autobiography
• Agnes Beaumont, The Narrative of the Persecution of Agnes Beaumont and Lawrence Clarkson, The Lost Sheep Found
  Week 3: Katherine Philips and Hester Pulter
• Selections of the manuscript poetry by Philips and Pulter
  Week 4: Later Milton
• Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes
  Week 5: John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester
• Poetry by Rochester
  READING WEEK
  Week 7: Restoration Drama (I)
• William Wycherley, The Country Wife and George Etherege, The Man of Mode
  Week 8: Restoration Drama (II)
• Aphra Behn, The Rover
  Week 9: John Dryden, Absalom and Achitophel
  Week 10: Aphra Behn, Oroonoko

Learning outcomes

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

• Show detailed knowledge of the main issues in the study of seventeenth-century literature across a variety of genres (e.g. masque, verse satire, essays).
• Consolidate and develop abilities in critical analysis of the relevance to the period’s literature of different written mediums used by writers in the period (e.g. print and manuscript) and different locations (e.g. the court, country, the playhouse) where their work was seen or read.
• Understand critical debates around how different seventeenth-century writers engaged with their historical (e.g. political, religious and theological, social or literary) contexts and incorporate these into their interpretations of the period’s literature.
• Extend their knowledge and understanding via early modern primary sources (via e.g. EEBO) which are not set texts on the module.

Indicative reading list

Reid Barbour, Literature and Religious Culture in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge, 2002).
Elizabeth Clarke and Danielle Clarke (eds), 'This Double Voice': Gendered Writing in Early Modern England (Basingstoke, 2000).
Tony Claydon, William III and the Godly Revolution (Cambridge, 1996).
Philip Connell, Secular Chains: Poetry and the Politics of Religion from Milton to Pope (Oxford, 2015).
Thomas N. Corns, A History of Seventeenth-Century Literature (Oxford, 2007).

• • • , Uncloistered Virtue: English Political Literature 1640-60 (Oxford, 1994).
      Brian Cummings, The Literary Culture of the Reformation: Grammar and Grace (Oxford, 2007).
      Richard Cust and Ann Hughes (eds) Conflict in Early Stuart England: Studies in Religion and Politics 1603-1642 (London, 1989).
      Christopher Durston and Judith Matlby (eds) Religion in Revolutionary England (Manchester, 2006).
      Howard Erskine-Hill, Poetry and the Realm of Politics: Shakespeare to Dryden (Oxford, 1996).
      Kenneth Fincham and Peter Lake (eds) Religious Politics in post-Reformation England (Woodbridge, 2002).
      Thomas Greene, Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven and London, 1982).
      Achsah Guibbory, Ceremony and Community from Herbert to Milton: Literature, Religion, and Cultural Conflict in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1998).
      Donna B. Hamilton and Richard Strier (eds) Religion, Literature, and Politics in post-Reformation England (Cambridge, 1996).
      Paul Hammond, The Making of Restoration Poetry (Cambridge, 2006).
      Tim Harris, Restoration: Charles II and His Kingdoms 1660-1685 (London, 2005).
• • • , Revolution: The Great Crisis of the Stuart Monarchy, 1685-1720 (London, 2006).
      Derek Hirst, Dominion: England and its Island Neighbours, 1500-1707 (Oxford, 2012).
      Derek Hirst and Richard Strier (eds), Writing and Political Engagement in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1999).
      Victoria Kahn, Wayward Contracts: The Crisis of Political Obligation in England, 1640-1674 (Berkeley, 2004).
      N.H. Keeble, The Restoration: England in the 1660s (Oxford, 2000).
      Mark Kishlansky, A Monarchy Transformed (London, 1997).
      Mark Knights, Representation and Misrepresentation: Political Culture in Later Stuart Britain (Oxford, 2005).
      Richard Kroll, The Material Word: Literate Culture in the Restoration and Early Eighteenth Century (Baltimore, 1991).
      Peter Lake with Michael Questier, The Antichrist's Lewd Hat: Protestants, Papists, and Players in post-Reformation England (New Haven and London, 2002).
      Peter Lake and Steven Pincus (eds) The Politics of the Public Sphere in Early Modern England (Manchester, 2007).
      Harold Love, Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford, 1993).
      Arthur Marotti, Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric (Ithaca, 1995).
      Arthur Marotti (ed.) Catholicism and Anti-Catholicism in Early Modern English Texts (Basingstoke, 1999).
      John Morrill (ed.), Revolution and Restoration: England in the 1650s (London, 1992).
• • • , The Nature of the English Revolution (London, 1993).
      David Norbrook, Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance rev. ed. (Oxford, 2002).
• • • , Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Politics, and Rhetoric 1627-1660 (Cambridge, 1999).
      Jason Peacey, Print and Public Politics in the English Revolution (Cambridge, 2013).
      Joanna Piccioto, Labors of Innocence in Early Modern England (Cambridge, MA., 2010).
      Joad Raymond, The Invention of the Newspaper: English Newsbooks, 1641-1649 (Oxford, 1996).
• • • , Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge 2003).
      Kevin Sharpe, The Personal Rule of Charles I (New Haven and London, 1992).
• • • , Image Wars: Promoting Kings and Commonwealths in England 1603-1660 (New Haven and London, 2010).
• • • , Rebranding Rule: The Restoration and Revolution Monarchy, 1660-1714 (New Haven and London, 2013).
      Kevin Sharpe and Peter Lake (eds) Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England (Basingstoke, 1994).
      Quentin Skinner, Liberty Before Liberalism (Cambridge, 2008).
      Nigel Smith, Literature and Revolution in England, 1640-1660 (New Haven and London, 1994).
      John Spurr, England in the 1670s: 'This Masquerading Age' (Oxford, 2002).
      Stephen Taylor and Grant Tapsall (eds) The Nature of the English Revolution Revisited (Woodbridge, 2013).
      Blair Worden, Literature and Politics in Cromwellian England: John Milton, Andrew Marvell, Marchmont Nedham (Oxford, 2007).
      Steven Zwicker, Lines of Authority: Politics and English Literary Culture 1649-1689 (Ithaca, 1993).

John Donne (see also the entry for Herbert below)
R.C. Bald, John Donne: A Life (Oxford, 1970).
David Colclough (ed.), John Donne's Professional Lives (Cambridge, 2003).
Achsah Guibbory, Returning to John Donne (London, 2015).
Jeffrey Johnson, The Theology of John Donne (Cambridge, 1999).
Daniel Starza Smith, John Donne and the Conway Papers: Patronage and Manuscript Circulation in the Early Seventeenth Century (Oxford, 2014).
Ramie Targoff, John Donne, Body and Soul (Chicago, 2008).

George Herbert
Elizabeth Clarke, Theory and Theology in George Herbert's Poetry: 'Divinitie, and Poesie Met' (Oxford, 1997).
Frances Cruickshank, Verse and Poetics in George Herbert and John Donne (Aldershot, 2010).
Barbara Lewalski, Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric (Princeton, 1979).
Michael C. Schoenfeldt, Prayer and Power: George Herbert and Renaissance Courtship (Chicago, 1991).
Richard Strier, Love Known: Theology and Experience in George Herbert's Poetry (Chicago, 1983).
Ceri Sullivan, The Rhetoric of Conscience in Donne, Herbert, and Vaughan (Oxford, 2008).
Helen Vendler, The Poetry of George Herbert (Cambridge, MA., 1975).
R.V. Young, Doctrine and Devotion in Seventeenth-Century Poetry: Studies in Donne, Herbert, Crashaw, and Vaughan(Cambridge, 2000).

Country House Poetry (Jonson and Lanyer) (see also the section on Marvell)
Lyn Bennett, Women Writing of Divinest Things: Rhetoric and the Poetry of Pembroke, Wroth, and Lanyer (Pittsburgh, 2004).
Marshall Grossman, Aemelia Lanyer: Gender, Genre, and the Canon (Lexington, 2002).
Anne Margaret Lange, Writing the Way Out: Inheritance and Appropriation in Aemelia Lanyer, Isabella Whitney, Mary (Sidney) Herbert, and Mary Wroth (New York, 2011).
Richard S. Peterson, Imitation and Praise in the Poems of Ben Jonson (New Haven, 1981).
Don E. Wayne, Penshurst: The Semiotics of Place and the Poetics of History (Maddison, 1984).
Suzanne Woods, Lanyer: A Renaissance Woman Poet (New York, 1999).

Masques
David Bevington and Peter Holbrook (eds), The Politics of the Stuart Court Masque (Cambridge University Press, 1998).
Martin Butler, The Stuart Court Masque and Political Culture (Oxford, 2008).
Barbara Lewalski, Writing Women in Jacobean England (Cambridge, MA, 1993), esp. Ch. 1.
David Lindley (ed.), The Court Masque (Manchester, 1984).
Stephen Orgel, The Jonsonian Masque (New York, 1981).

• • • , The Illusion of Power (Chicago, 1975).
      Barbara Ravelhofer, The Early Stuart Masque: Dance, Costume, and Music (Oxford, 2006).
      Lauren Shohet, Reading Masques: The English Masque and Public Culture in the Seventeenth Century (Oxford, 2010).

John Webster, James Shirley, and Early Seventeenth-Century Drama
Kate Aughterson, Webster: The Tragedies (Basingstoke, 2001).
M.C. Bradbrook, John Webster: Citizen and Dramatist (London, 1980).
Martin Butler, Theatre and Crisis, 1632-1642 (Oxford, 1983).
Dympna Callaghan, Women and Gender in Renaissance Tragedy (New York and London, 1989).
David Coleman, John Webster: Renaissance Dramatist (Edinburgh, 2010).
Paul Frazer and Adam Hansen (eds), The White Devil: A Critical Reader (London, 2016).
Christina Luckyj, A Winter's Snake: Dramatic Form in the Tragedies of John Webster (Athens, 1989).
Jacqueline Pearson, Tragedy and Tragicomedy in the Plays of John Webster (Manchester, 1980).
Stephen Purcell, Webster: The White Devil (Basingstoke, 2012).
Barbara Ravelhofer (ed.), James Shirley and Early Modern Theatre: New Critical Perspectives (London, 2016).
Julie Sanders, Caroline Drama: The Plays of Massinger, Ford, Shirley, and Brome (Plymouth, 1999).
Peter Womack, English Renaissance Drama (Oxford, 2006).

Cavalier Poets
Ruth Connolly and Tom Cain (eds), Lords of Wine and Oile: Community and Conviviality in the Poetry of Robert Herrick(Oxford, 2011).
Leah Marcus, The Politics of Mirth: Jonson, Herrick, Milton, Marvell and the Defense of Old Holiday Pastimes (Chicago, 1986).
Syrithe Pugh, Herrick, Fanshawe and the Politics of Intertextuality: Classical Literature and Seventeenth-Century Royalism(Farnham, 2010).
L.E. Semler, The English Mannerist Poets and the Visual Arts (Madison, N.J., 1998).
Kevin Sharpe, Criticism and Compliment: The Politics of Literature in the England of Charles I (Cambridge, 1987).
Robert Wilcher, The Discontented Cavalier: The Work of Sir John Suckling in its Social, Religious, Political, and Literary Contexts (Newark, 2007).

• • • • , The Writing of Royalism, 1628-1660 (Cambridge, 2001).

Andrew Marvell
Martin Dzelzainis and Warren Chernaik (eds) Marvell and Liberty (Basingstoke, 1999).
Derek Hirst and Steven Zwicker, Andrew Marvell: Orphan of the Hurricane (Oxford, 2012).
Patrick Cullen, Spenser, Marvell, and Renaissance Pastoral (Cambridge, MA., 1970).
Nicholas McDowell, Poetry and Allegiance in the English Civil Wars: Marvell and the Cause of Wit (Oxford, 2008) - also good for the Cavaliers, especially Lovelace.
Donald Smith, The Cartographic Imagination in Early Modern England (Aldershot, 2007), principally Ch. 5 on 'Appleton House'.
Nigel Smith, Andrew Marvell: The Chameleon (New Haven and London, 2009).
Margarita Stocker, Apocalyptic Marvell: The Second Coming in Seventeenth-Century Poetry (Brighton, 1986).
John M. Wallace, Destiny His Choice: The Loyalism of Andrew Marvell (Cambridge, 1968).
Robert Wilcher, Andrew Marvell (Cambridge, 1985).

John Milton
David Armitage, Armand Himy, and Quentin Skinner (eds), Milton and Republicanism (Cambridge, 1995).
Cedric C. Brown, John Milton's Aristocratic Entertainments (Cambridge, 1985).
Warren Chernaik, Milton and the Burden of Freedom (Cambridge, 2017).
Thomas N. Corns and Gordon Campbell, John Milton: Life, Work, Thought (Oxford, 2008).
Paul Hammond, Milton and the People (Oxford, 2014).
Paul Hammond and Blair Worden (eds), John Milton: Life, Writing, Reputation (Oxford, 2008).
Christopher Hill, The Experience of Defeat: Milton and Some Contemporaries (New York, 1984).
Edward Jones (ed.), Young Milton: The Emerging Author (Oxford, 2012).
Barbara Lewalski, Milton's Brief Epic: The Genre, Meaning, and Art of Paradise Regain'd (Providence, 1966).

• • • , The Life of John Milton: A Critical Biography (Oxford, 2000).
      David Loewenstein, Representing Revolution in Milton and his Contemporaries: Religion, Politics, and Polemics in Radical Puritanism (Oxford, 2000).
      Graham Parry and Joad Raymond (eds) Milton and the Terms of Liberty (Cambridge, 2002).
      Stella Revard, Milton and the Tangles of Neaera's Hair: The Making of the 1645 Poems (Columbia, 1997).
      Elizabeth Sauer, Milton, Toleration and Nationhood (Cambridge, 2014).
      John T. Shawcross, The Uncertain World of Samson Agonistes (Cambridge, 2001).
      Gordon Teskey, The Poetry of John Milton (Cambridge, MA., 2016)
• • • , Delirious Milton: The Fate of the Poet in Modernity (Cambridge, MA., 2006).
      Joseph Wittreich, Interpreting Samson Agonistes (Princeton, 1986).

Katherine Philips and Hester Pulter
Carol Barash, English Women's Poetry, 1649-1714: Politics, Community, and Linguistic Authority (Oxford, 1996).
Hero Chalmers, Royalist Women Writers, 1650-1689 (Oxford, 2004).
Catherine Gray, Women Writers and Public Debate in 17th-Century Britain (Basingstoke, 2007).
Sarah Ross, Women, Poetry, and Politics in Seventeenth-Century Britain (Oxford, 2015).
Sarah Ross and Elizabeth Scott-Baumann (eds), Women Poets of the English Civil War (Manchester, 2017).
Paul Salzman, Reading Early Modern Women's Writing (Oxford, 2006).
Mihoko Suzuki, The History of British Women's Writing, 1610-1690 (Basingstoke, 2011).
Elizabeth Scott-Baumann, Forms of Engagement: Women, Poetry, and Culture 1640-1680 (Oxford, 2013).
Helen Wilcox (ed.), Women and Literature in Britain, 1500-1700 (Cambridge, 1996) - material in here on Behn as well as Philips.

Spiritual Autobiography and Puritan / Non-Conformist Literature
Sharon Achinstein, Literature and Dissent in Milton's England (Cambridge, 2003).
Christopher Hill, A Turbulent, Factious, and Seditious People: John Bunyan and his Church (London, 1988).
N.H. Keeble, The Literary Culture of Non-Conformity in Later Seventeenth-Century England (Leicester, 1987).
Nicholas McDowell, The English Radical Imagination: Culture, Religion, and Revolution 1630-60 (Oxford, 2003).
Nigel Smith, Perfection Proclaimed: Language and Literature in English Radical Religion 1640-60 (Oxford, 1989).
John Stachniewski, The Persecutory Imagination: English Puritanism and the Literature of Religious Despair (Oxford, 1991).

John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester
Matthew Augustine and Steven Zwicker (eds), Lord Rochester and the Restoration World (Cambridge, 2015).
Warren Chernaik, Sexual Freedom in Restoration Literature (Cambridge, 1995) - also has a chapter on Behn.
Germaine Greer, John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester (London, 2000).
Harold Love (ed.), The Works of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester (Oxford, 1999).
Marianne Thormahlen, Rochester: The Poems in Context (Cambridge, 1993).
Christopher Tilmouth, Passion's Triumph Over Reason: A History of the Moral Imagination from Spenser to Rochester(Oxford, 2007).

Restoration Drama
J. Douglas Canfield, Tricksters and Estates: On the Ideology of Restoration Comedy (Lexington, 1997).
Peter Holland, The Ornament of Action: Text and Performance in Restoration Comedy (Cambridge, 1979).
Elizabeth Howe, The First English Actresses: Women and Drama 1660-1700 (Cambridge, 1992).
Robert D. Hume, The Development of English Drama in the Late Seventeenth Century (Oxford, 1976).
Derek Hughes, English Drama, 1660-1700 (Oxford, 1996).
Tim Keenan, Restoration Staging, 1660-74 (London, 2017).
Richard Kroll, Restoration Drama and the Circle of Commerce: Tragicomedy, Politics, and Trade in the Seventeenth Century(Cambridge, 2007).
Robert Markley, Two Edg'd Weapons: Style and Ideology in the Comedies of Etherege, Wycherly, and Congreve (Oxford, 1988).
David Roberts, Restoration Plays and Players: An Introduction (Cambridge, 2014).
Susan Staves, Players' Sceptors: Fictions of Authority in the Restoration (Lincoln, NB, 1979).

John Dryden
Paul Hammond, Dryden and the Traces of Classical Rome (Oxford, 1999).
Phillip Harth, 'Pen for a Party': Dryden's Tory Propaganda in its Contexts (Princeton, 1993).
David Hopkins, John Dryden (Tavistock, 2004).

• • • , John Dryden (Cambridge, 1986).
      James Anderson Winn, John Dryden and his World (New Haven and London, 1987).
      Steven N. Zwicker, Dryden's Political Poetry: The Typology of King and Nation (Providence, 1972).
• • • , Politics and Language in Dryden's Poetry: The Arts of Disguise (Princeton, 1984).

Aphra Behn
Kate Aughterson, Aphra Behn: The Comedies (Basingstoke, 2003).
Catherine Gallagher, Nobody's Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women in the Marketplace, 1670-1820 (Oxford, 1993).
Derek Hughes, The Theatre of Aphra Behn (Basingstoke, 2001).
Heidi Hunter, Rereading Aphra Behn (Charlottesville, 1993).
Jane Spencer, Aphra Behn's Afterlife (Oxford, 2000).
Janet Todd (ed.), Aphra Behn (Basingstoke, 2001).

• • • , Aphra Behn Studies (Cambridge, 1996).
      Susan Wiseman, Aphra Behn 2nd. ed. (Tavistock, 2007).

Subject specific skills

No subject specific skills defined for this module.

Transferable skills

No transferable skills defined for this module.