Mourning and Sexuality in the English Elegy

Catalog description

From antiquity to the present, poets have written elegies to express their diverse experiences of the mingling of love and loss. In this advanced seminar on poetic history, genre, and form, we’ll explore a major poetic genre—the elegy—in relation to its two, intertwined themes: death and sex. All of the elegies we’ll read raise challenging questions about desire, identification, reproduction, gender, and sexuality. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.