New and Imagined Worlds from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance

Catalog description

This course examines how medieval and early modern writers imagined distant worlds alongside Europe’s rapidly expanding geographic horizons. Beginning with medieval travel narratives such as The Travels of Sir John Mandeville and selections from Marco Polo, we consider how encounters with the East and the New World, real or fraudulent, shaped later literary depictions of fully imaginary worlds, such as Thomas More’s Utopia, Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis, John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World, and Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver's Travels. Together, we will read major canonical works that reimagine lands outside of Europe as laboratories for political theory, scientific speculation, and satire. Throughout, we will examine how these imagined geographies set the groundwork for later genres such as fantasy and science fiction, looking at short stories by Octavia Butler, Ursula LeGuin, and Theodore Sturgeon.