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Literature, Culture and Politics in Early Modern England: Context

Module description

The Tudor and Stuart period was a golden one in English literary achievement.  It was also one in which major poets and dramatists were involved in, or engaged with, political events to a greater extent than ever before, thanks to significant changes in structures and technologies, not least of which was the advent of print. In this module, you will explore the relationship between literary developments and the political changes occurring in this era of Renaissance, Reformation, and Civil War, through the study of texts by authors such as More, Shakespeare, Jonson, and Milton.  You will consider their lives and influences, as well as the texts they produced, and relate the writings to their historical contexts; and you will investigate the shifts in the history of reading and print culture that shaped how the texts were received, and the impact they had.  You will also be encouraged to read more widely in the literature of the period and to consider the historical changes which the literature of the period illuminates or reflects. This module is especially suitable for students with an interest in interdisciplinary studies, combining as it does the study of history, literature, and politics.  Students taking this module will also be required to take the module, Literature, Culture, and Politics in Early Modern England: Sources.

Module aims - intentions of the module

Over the course of the module, you will have the opportunity to develop your understanding of the classic canon of the English Literary Renaissance, so influential in shaping the development of English literature and culture ever since.  You will also develop an understanding of the political and religious upheavals of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which had a profound effect upon the way that the England is governed to this day.  This module will allow you to enhance your critical thinking skills, as you study the interrelationship of complex political, social, and religious factors, and it will provide you with the opportunity to engage with an interdisciplinary strand of research that is constantly changing, as scholars find new approaches to the study of the history of literature, and the history of the book.

Intended Learning Outcomes (ILOs)

ILO: Module-specific skills

On successfully completing the module you will be able to...

• 1. Evaluate the different complex themes in the history of early modern literature, the contexts of its production, and its significance.
• 2. Make close specialist evaluation of the key developments within the period, developed through independent study and seminar work.

ILO: Discipline-specific skills

On successfully completing the module you will be able to...

• 3. Analyse the key developments within the political and literary history of early modern England.
• 4. Focus on and comprehend complex issues.
• 5. Understand and deploy relevant historical terminology in a comprehensible manner.
• 6. Follow changes and continuities in social, political, and cultural developments across the period.

ILO: Personal and key skills

On successfully completing the module you will be able to...

• 7. Independently and autonomously study and also work within a group, including presentation of material for group discussion, developed through the mode of learning
• 8. Digest, select and organise material to produce, to a deadline, a coherent and cogent argument, developed through the mode of assessment
• 9. Present complex arguments orally

Syllabus plan

Among the themes we will study in this module are: the Court; humanism; nobility, honour and service; biography; literature and the nation; the production of books; the relationship between Christian and classical values; the role of women in printing, reading, and writing; early Stuart monarchy and the masque; the development of the history play; the relationship of the drama to politics and to Puritanism; the responses of writers to the Civil Wars.  We will read a wide variety of literary, and other, texts, including authors such as Skelton, More, Wyatt, Sidney, Spenser, Marlow, Shakespeare, Jonson, Bacon, Middleton, Massinger, Milton, Marvell, and others.

Learning activities and teaching methods (given in hours of study time)

Details of learning activities and teaching methods

Formative assessment

Summative assessment (% of credit)

Details of summative assessment

Details of re-assessment (where required by referral or deferral)

Indicative learning resources - Basic reading

• Achinstein, S., Milton and Toleration (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
• Axton, M., The Queen's Two Bodies: Drama and the Elizabethan Succession (London: Royal Historical Society, 1977).
• Baker-Smith, D., More's Utopia (London: Harper Collins, 1991).
• Brigden, S., Thomas Wyatt: The Heart’s Forest (London: Faber and Faber, 2012).
• Burlinson, C. & Zurcher, A. (eds.), Edmund Spenser: Selected Letters and Other Papers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
• Burrow, C., ‘The experience of exclusion: literature and politics in the reigns of Henry VII and Henry VIII’ in D. Wallace (ed.), The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
• Bushnell, R.W., Tragedies of Tyrants. Political Thought and Theater in the English Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990).
• Campbell, G. & Corns, T.N., John Milton: Life, Work and Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
• Cummings, B & Simpson, J. (eds.), Cultural Reformations: Medieval and Renaissance in Literary Culture
• (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
• Donaldson, I., Ben Jonson: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
• Grafton, A. & Jardine, L., ‘How Gabriel Harvey Read his Livy’, Past and Present (1990).
• Griffiths, J. John Skeleton and Poetic Authority: Defining the Liberty to Speak (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006).
• Hadfield, A. (ed.), Literature and Censorship in Renaissance England (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001).
• Hirst, D. & Zwicker, S., Andrew Marvell, Orphan of the Hurricane (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
• Kewes, P. (ed.), The Uses of History in Early Modern England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006) and in HLQ, 68 (2005).
• Nelson, E. ‘Greek Nonsense in More’s Utopia’, Historical Journal, 44 (2001), 889-917.
• Norbrook, D., Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics, 1627-1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
• Patterson, A., The Writer in Public Life (London: Longman, 2000).
• Schwyzer, P. Literature, Nationalism and Memory in Early Modern England and Wales (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
• Scott-Warren, J., Early Modern English Literature (Cambridge: Polity, 2005).
• Sharpe, K., Criticism and Compliment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
• Taylor, A.W. ‘Glass Houses: Surrey, Petrarch, and the Religious Poetics of the ‘London’ invective’, RES, 57 (2006).
• Walker, G. Writing under Tyranny: English Literature and the Henrician Reformation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
• Woolf, D.R., Reading History in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
• Worden, B., ‘Delightful Teaching: Queen Elizabeth and Sidney’s Arcadia’ in Elizabeth I and the Culture of Writing, ed. Beal, P. & Ioppolo, G. (London: British Library, 2007).
• Zwicker, Z., Lines of Authority: Politics and English Literary Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993).

Indicative learning resources - Web based and electronic resources

• Early English Books Online; Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

Key words search

Literature, Politics, Shakespeare, Tudors, Stuarts, Milton