British Literature of the 17th Century

Catalog description

Colonialism and empire, economic slavery, regicide, revolution, one of the earliest experiments with republicanism in the modern world, the development of scientific empiricism and positivism, the invention of newspapers… all of these events and institutions in seventeenth-century Britain, so fundamental to our own culture, not only shaped but were shaped by its literature, which was one of the central public forums in which ideas were ventured and debated. Students read poems, plays, prose, and speeches by writers both famous and (now) obscure, from Francis Bacon and Mary Wroth to John Milton and Kenelm Digby, as a window into their thinking about such central problems as love, friendship, community, beauty, profit and self-interest, and political justice.