Learning Outcomes:
• Gain a good understanding of the ‘global Renaissance’ and why it matters
• Learn to test alternative models of literary history
• Learn to re-evaluate ‘known’ authors through a new critical lens
• Develop analytical and research skills for reading historically and critically
• Engage critically with interdisciplinary methods, values and materials
• Develop strong analytical and writing skills through the formative and summative assessment for the module
Indicative Module Content:
This modules focusses on the way English literature engages a global imaginary from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth century, and interrogates how far such literature should be considered the subject of the new 'global Renaissance studies'.
Our primary material from the period will include the new global cartography and geography, as epitomized in the very first printed atlas; travel plays and plays that engage the materials and practices of travelling the globe; travel accounts of English travellers to the Persian, Ottoman and Mughal empires; poems that cross cultures and seek to imagine new transnational forms; and histories of the books, institutions, imperial and trading structures that supported the early modern global imaginary, from the point of view of Britain and Ireland.
Secondary reading will be crucial to the module's analysis of 'global Renaissance' studies, its opportunities and fallacies, its sources and ambitions. We will work largely from very recent work - a forthcoming special issue of Modern Philology, and the (summer 2021) second edition of the direction-setting Blackwell Companion to the Global Renaissance, edited by Jyotsna G Singh.