CHECK IT OUT - Video Course Description!

This course will explore English literature from its beginnings in the late 600s up to and including William Shakespeare. We’ll study such notable texts as Beowulf, The Canterbury Tales, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, The Faerie Queene, and Dr. Faustus, and we’ll also dig into less-known but perhaps even more important texts like the first book we know to have been written in English by a woman as well as  narratives trying to make sense of a large labor demonstration in London. As the course title promises, our focus will be on representations of love--romantic and otherwise--and depictions of warriors. Lovers and fighters change a lot in English literature between the 600s and the 1600s; we’ll track and investigate those changes and, as we do, learn a lot about the historical and cultural contexts that shaped the earliest stories in English. 

This course satisfies the following English major/minor requirement: Pre-1642