English Epic

Catalog description

Study of large-scale, verse narratives created or received as English national epics, or composed in the epic tradition. Texts will represent the major time periods of earlier English literary history and might include : Beowulf from the Old English period; Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene from the Elizabethan period; John Milton's Paradise Lost from the seventeenth century; Alexander Pope's The Rape of the Lock from the eighteenth century. Critical attention will be paid throughout to changing and competing conceptions of England, nation, and epic.