This course examines the intimate connections between poetics and politics in Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Civil War and Commonwealth literature. The texts to be studied may include plays and poems, as well as essays, political, historical, and theological writings, and works of prose fiction. Close readings of these texts will focus on such issues as kingship, transgression, rhetoric, religion, rights, and the relation between political subjection and literary subjectivity; the literary contributions will be studied in the light of a range of different approaches. Reading-intensive course. (Offered in odd-numbered years.)
