Courses

This class will focus on premodern theories of political resistance and the ways in which literary texts engage and reimagine them. In particular, we will focus on many of the key political analogies of the period with a gendered dimension, including those between the household and the state, the marital and the social contract, and rape and tyranny. We will consider the ways in which early modern poems and plays present multiple forms of resistance to repression and subordination, and reimagine sexual, social, and political relationships in new and creative ways. Readings will include key classical and biblical intertexts, domestic conduct books, defenses of women, poetry (by William Shakespeare, Aemilia Lanyer and Lucy Hutchinson), drama (Macbeth, Othello, The Winter’s Tale, and Gallathea), and fiction (by Margaret Cavendish). The class will also include visits to The Morgan Library, Columbia’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art.