Vorlesung: Writing in Troubled Times: English Literature in the Seventeenth Century

The seventeenth century was one of the most troubled periods in English history: A civil war, a revolution, the King beheaded, monarchy abolished, a revolutionary regime hoping to bring about the end of the world, followed by the Restoration, which brought back the monarchy, followed by yet another revolution. Add to this major disasters afflicting London in a spectacular and utterly frightening manner, i. e. the Great Plague, which killed off about a quarter of the capital´s population, and the Great Fire, which destroyed most of the City of London. Add, furthermore, exciting developments in the history of science which had the power to change the way people perceived the world, and the beginnings of global trade, exploration and exploitation.

How did authors respond to all of this? In order to find out, this lecture course will cover a wide range of texts and topics. You will encounter green thoughts, flying cows, a poet with a pet pig, explicit erotic poetry and drama, Satan leading an army of rebel angels, melancholy and madness, the first ever actresses on the English stage, pioneering female authors, someone smoking spiders, a remarkable diarist and much else besides. You will also get a chance to look at art and listen to music of the period.

Almost all texts covered in this lecture course are available in EEBO (Early English Books Online). You should familiarize yourselves with this digital resource before the beginning of the semester. Very useful further reading: Christoph Heyl, Kleine Englische Literaturgeschichte (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2020), ISBN: 978-3-476-04509-6.

Further requirements: Anything that might be required according to yor Modulhandbuch / Studienordnung.

The lecture course will probably be conducted entirely online and entirely in real time - it all depends on the conditions imposed by the pandemic which are not really predictable right now. In this case, we will meet via Zoom each week of the semester at the time of the lecture. You will receive further information concerning the Moodle room and the Zoom link for this course once you have registered. Please make sure to use and check your official university e-mail addresses at all times. Do not use any other addresses, and do not have e-mails sent to your university address forwarded to other addresses. Our experience in the last semester has shown that using non-university addresses / forwarding mails will lead to our messages bouncing back in very many cases.

Just in case your application is rejected by the LSF system: If you want to do this course because you are genuinely interested, you will be most welcome, no matter what LSF says. Please get in touch with claudia.hausmann@uni-due.de who will enrol you manually. The worst that might happen to you is that you cannot do a Leistungsnachweis if you lack the formal requirements.