Unit information: Literature 2 (1500-1700) for Joint Honours in 2010/11

Unit name	Literature 2 (1500-1700) for Joint Honours
Unit code	ENGL20203
Credit points	20
Level of study	I/5
Teaching block(s)	Teaching Block 2 (weeks 13 - 24)
Unit director	Dr. James
Open unit status	Not open
Pre-requisites	None.
Co-requisites	None.
School/department	Department of English
Faculty	Faculty of Arts

Description including Unit Aims

This unit focuses on the literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Poets to be studied might include Wyatt, Spenser, Sidney, Donne, Jonson, Herbert, Cowley, Marvell, Milton, Rochester, or Dryden; dramatists might include Marlowe, Jonson, Webster, or Middleton; prose writers might include Sidney, Bacon, or Bunyan.

Aims:

The aim of this unit is to give students a grounding in literature of the 16th and 17th centuries; to give students an understanding of the distinctive qualities of literature of this period; and to give students an understading of the distinctive qualities of some important writers of the period.

Intended Learning Outcomes

Learning objectives include the ability to develop and express, in lucid and correct prose, cogent arguments in essays; the ability to select and analyse pertinent passages from the literary text that would support such arguments; the ability to make intelligent use of secondary criticism and theoretical perspectives (where appropriate); mastery of the technical vocabulary and analytical tools of literary criticism and of the conventions of academic style and referencing.

Teaching Information

3 lectures and 1 tutorial a week, plus 1-to-1 discussions in consultation hours where desired.

Assessment Information

2 summative essays:

• 1 essay of 1,000 words max (33%)

• 1 essay of 2,000 words max (66%)

Reading and References

• John Donne, Poems, ed A.J. Smith (Harmondsworth, 1971)

• Ben Jonson, Poems, ed. G. Parfitt (Harmondsworth, 1988)

• Ben Jonson, Plays, ed. G.A. Wilkes (Oxford, 1999)

• Christopher Marlowe, Dr Faustus and Other Plays, ed. David Bevington (Oxford, 2008)

• John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. John Leonard (Harmondsworth, 2003)

• David Womersley, ed, Restoration Drama: An Anthology (Blackwell, 2000)