Making Use of Renaissance Literature

Catalog description

English Renaissance poetry boasted a classically inspired commitment to pleasure and profit, but a cognate concern with utility and experience permeated both literature the vernacular technologies of everyday life. This course considers the ubiquity of how-to writing in early modern England, as such imperatives shaped both lived experience and cultural production. Readings draw from prose and poetic genres (including essay, dialogue, and pamphlet; and lyric, didactic and devotional verse) and cover practical and impractical advice on conduct, the passions, and technologies of everyday life, including recipes, letters, hygiene, and diet. We will weigh the virtues of a range of historical and theoretical approaches to these questions, including new historicism, psychoanalysis, theories of racialization and embodiment, the sociology of manners, feminist criticism, and biopolitics and governmentality.