The specific availability for this course is not currently known. If you would like to know if this course will be offered during your session, please contact us.

Full Description

Content:

This course aims to familiarize students with the history of the (English) sonnet in the late medieval and early modern period – with a glance at the post-Renaissance developments. The first part of this class focuses on the sonnet as a European phenomenon, exploring the sources of the sonnet in thirteenth-century Italian poetry. Besides reading Petrarch’s Canzoniere and excerpts from Castiglione’s and Tasso’s sonnets, we will also briefly consider French sonnets, that is, selections from du Bellay’s L’Olive and Ronsard’s Amours, before crossing the channel to continue with sonnets by Sir Thomas Wyatt and the Earl of Surrey. At the center of the class will be the famous English sonnet sequences, Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella, Spenser’s Amoretti, and Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Finally, we will read a few sonnets by Milton, Gray, Warton, Wordsworth, and Keats – again with a view to continental literary developments.

Bibliography:

A detailed reading list will be available at the beginning of March and will be emailed to you once you have signed up for the class. While editions of Petrarch’s and Spenser’s sonnets will be put on reserve in the departmental library, students must obtain (and read!) Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella and Shakespeare’s Sonnets by the beginning of the semester: Sir Philip Sidney, The Major Works, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); William Shakespeare, Complete Poems and Sonnets, ed. Colin Burrow (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).

Prerequisites:

Introduction to Literature, willingness to work

Assessment:

Participation and written assignments (60%), oral presentation (40%) for 4 ECTS-Points; participation and written assignments (30%), presentation (20%), research paper (50%) for 6 ECTS-Points.