British Literature of the 16th Century

Catalog description

In the decades after the Reformation, Britain was roiled by religious and political debates both intensely local and far transcending the country’s national boundaries, at the same time that its citizens were figuring out for the first time what it meant to be a nation with its own distinct language and culture. Sonnets, epics, political treatises, closet drama, and the first plays for the public stage all competed in what became the country’s first public literary marketplace, as economic and political changes helped foster the first English literature and the first conception of the person that we can call truly modern. Students make themselves present at the hotly contested beginnings of genres, categories and ideas familiar enough to them now that they take them as natural, by reading poems and plays so enduring that 400 years later they are still part of our cultural fabric.