New Classicism

This graduate seminar is an investigation and interrogation of the English Renaissance. It will offer grounding in the nineteenth-century emergence of the Renaissance as a cultural and conceptual category, as well as the prevailing scholarly understanding of how sixteenth-century writers, poets, and playwrights negotiated their estrangement from the classical past. But the course will also aim, more urgently, to forge new pathways in classical reception studies. To what uses, we will ask, did English writers put their classical sources, and what imagined ideas about antiquity did they generate as a result? How did that engagement with classical sources shape emergent ideas about gender, race, and class? And though the course will center on the literary production of late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth century England, it will also cast a wide geographical net, seeking out the Renaissances and classical pasts that have been neglected in the focus on the European revival of ancient Greece and Rome. Attending to a variety of critical methodologies, this seminar will bring together a range of literary forms, including drama, epic, poetry, and civic spectacle, from a range of places, including England, Italy, and the Ottoman Empire.