English 721: Seventeenth-Century Literature
Brooklyn College
MA Program
Prof M Elsky

Spring 1999

Course description

While we now think of literary writing as a mainstay of artistic culture, in the early seventeenth century, writing literature was not a fully accepted profession, and literary writers had to find a social position from which they could be heard. Authors therefore had to find ways to legitimate their voices through the literary genres in which they chose to write. Within the broader perspective of seventeenth-century literature, this course will focus on how three pairs of men and women writers author-ized themselves in three genres: love poetry by John Donne and Mary Wroth; poems about home by Ben Jonson and Aemelia Lanyer; religious devotion by George Herbert and Anna Trapnel. The main issues of the course will include 1)differing social attitudes towards men and women writers in the early modern period; 2) differing ways men and women writers claim authority for their writing; and 3)differing approaches to genre formation by men and women.

Required texts

Thomas N. Corns, Cambridge Companion to English Poetry: Donne to Marvell. Cambridge.

John Donne's Poetry. Ed. A. C. Clements. Norton.

George Herbert and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Poets. Ed. M. di Cesare. Norton.

Ben Jonson and the Cavalier Poets. Ed. H Maclean. Norton.

Divine Right and Democracy in Stuart England. Ed. David Wooton. Penguin.

Her Own Life: Autobiographical Writings by Seventeenth-Century Englishwomen. Elspeth Graham. Routledge.

The Poems of Lady Mary Wroth. Ed. J Roberts. LSU Press.

The Poems of Aemilia Lanyer : Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum. Ed. Susanne Woods. Oxford UP

English Literature: Early 17th Century (1603-1660)

Renaissance texts

Course outline

I. Gendered Writing: Men and Women Authors

Mary Ellen Lamb, Gender and Authorship in the Sidney Circle (Madison: U Wisconsin P, 1991)

Ann Rosalind Jones, The Currency of Eros: Women's love Lyric in Europe, 1540-1620 (Bloomington: U Indiana P, 1990), pp. 1-35

Betty Travitsky, "Introduction: Placing Women in the English Renaissance," in The Renaissance Englishwoman in Print: Counterbalancing the Canon, ed. Anne Haselcorn and Betty Travitsky (Amherst: U Massachusetts P, 1990), pp. 3-41.

Wendy Wall, The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1993)

II. Petrarchanism and Gender

Sheila Fisher and Janet Halley, Seeking the Woman in Late Medieval and Renaissance Writings (Knoxville: U Tennessee P, 1989)

Elaine Hobby, "The Politics of Gender," in Corns

Nancy K. Vickers, "Diana Described: Scattered Woman and Scattered Rhyme," Critical Inquiry, 8(1981), 265-280

Francesco Petrarch: Letters

III. Love Poetry

John Donne

To His Mistress Going to Bed, The Broken Heart, A Valediction: Of Weeping, The Jeat Ring Sent, The Funeral, The Dream, The Sun Rising

Secondary reading: Barbara L. Estrin, Laura: Uncovering Gender and Genre in Wyatt, Donne, and Marvell (Durham: Duke UP, 1994), pp. 1-38, 149-179

Arthur Marotti,"Manuscript, Print, and the History of the Lyric," in Corns

Arthur Marotti, John Donne: Coterie Poet (Madison: U Wisconsin P, 1986)

John Donne Homepage
John Donne Homepage

Mary Wroth

Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, Sonnets 1-12, Songs 1,2; Crowne of Sonnets to end of sequence

Secondary readings

Elaine V. Beilin, Redeeming Eve: Women Writers of the English Renaissance (Princeton: princeton UP, 1987), pp. 208-246

Barbara Lewalski, Writing Women in Jacobean England (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1993), pp. 243-308

Naomi Miller, Changing the Subject: Mary Wroth and the Figurations of Gender in Early Modern England (Lexington: U Kentucky P, 1996)

-----------, "Rewriting Lyric Fictions: The Role of the Lady in Mary Wroth's Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, in Haselkorn & Travitsky, The Renaissance Englishwoman in Print, pp. 295-310.

Mary Wroth Homepage
Pamphilia to Amphilanthus

IV. Poetry of the House

Ben Jonson

To Penshurst, To Sir Robert Wroth

Secondary Readings

Thomas Marshall, "Addressing the House: Jonson's Ideology of Penshurst," Texas Studies in Language and Literature, 35(1993), 57-78

Don Wayne, Penshurst: The Semiotics of Place and the Poetics of History (Madison: U Wisconsin P, 1984), pp. 3-44

Ben Jonson Homepage

Aemelia Lanyer

Dedicatory poems, A Description of Cooke-ham

See also The Diary of Anne Clifford, in Graham, Her Own Life, pp. 35-53

Secondary readings

Barbara Lewalski, Writing Women in Jacobean England, pp. 213-308

Wendy Wall, Imprint of Gender, pp.

Marshall Grossman, ed., Aemilia Lanyer : Gender, Genre, and the Canon (Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1998) [on order in library]

Aemelia Lanyer Homepage

V. Religious Poetry and Prose

George Herbert

The Temple: Superliminare, The Altar, Easter Wings, Affliction (I), The Collar, The Holy Scriptures (I) (II), Denial, Jordan (I) (II), A True Hymn, Love (III)

Secondary Readings

George Herbert Homepage

Anna Trapnel

William Walwyn, The Compassionate Samaritane, in Wooton, Divine Right and Democracy, pp. 247-271 (read as introduction to radical Protestant politics of the Civil War period)

Anna Trapnel's Report and Plea, in Graham, Her Own Life, pp. 71-87

Secondary readings

Margaret Hannay, ed., Silent but for the Word : Tudor Women As Patrons, Translators, and Writers of Religious Works (Kent OH: Kent State UP 1985)