(Historical studies in the English, American and Comparative literature traditions are organized into three part sequences.) **

When Virgil's hero Aeneas deserts his beloved Dido in order to fulfill his destiny to found Rome, he establishes the oppositions around which many of the major works of medieval and Renaissance literature would orient themselves. Is civic duty to be preferred to individual love, as Virgil is usually read as suggesting? Is the straight path of epic to be chosen over the wandering itinerary of romance? Are the transcendent truths of Empire and Church to be pursued over the immediate experiences of private life? Medieval literature, with its idealization of courtly ladies and knights errant, is often seen as taking the side of Dido, while Renaissance literature, with its self-conscious return to antique ideals, is usually said to champion Aeneas. With this framework in mind, we will read St. Augustine, the Carmina Burana poets, the troubadours, Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Ariosto, and Tasso, among other authors. A concurrent tutorial will be offered for those who wish to read the original Latin, Old French, or Old Provencal texts.

This course explores seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literature in England, during a vital transition between a period of dissent, struggle and war to an achieved modernity, a nation of divergent identities in compromise. The seventeenth century's characteristic figure is Satan struggling against God in Milton's Paradise Lost.. but other poets and dramatists like John Donne, Ben Jonson, John Webster, and Andrew Marvell helped to shape the age's passionate interest in the conflict of political, religious, and social ideas and values. After the Civil War and the Puritan rule, monarchy was restored, at least as a reassuring symbol, and writers were free to play up the differences as they did in the witty, bawdy dramatic comedies of the elites and the novels by writers such as Defoe and Fielding which appealed to middle-class readers. Fulfills program requirement as explained in note at beginning of Literature Program courses.

See above.

Cross-listed: American Studies, Victorian Studies

In this course we will study works written between 1865 and 1930--from the post-civil war period to the start of the Depression, emphasizing the new and evolving spirit of realism, naturalism, and emergent modernism. Authors include, but are not limited to Henry James, Mark Twain, Theodore Dreiser, Edith Wharton, Robert Frost, Louise Bogan, Dawn Powell, and F. Scott Fitzgerald.