English literature Year II 2015/16 (full-time students)
Study guide - lectures
Prerequisites: names (first names and surnames) of the authors, titles of the main works. Spelling mistakes in the names of the writers will result in point deduction. General chronology - the ability to place an author in the appropriate century.
Old English literature. Titles, genres and themes. Formal feature - alliterative verse, accentual system, rhetorical devices - kenning. Flyting and its role. Christian and pagan influences. Caedmon - his story and his poetry.
Middle English literature - three languages. Arthurian literature - origins and themes: the Knights of the Round Table, the quest for the Holy Graal. Translatio Studii et Imperii. Chivalric romance. Courtly love. Alliterative revival. The poems from Cotton Nero manuscript: Sir Gawain, Purity, Patience, Pearl. Concantenation. Dream-vision technique. Allegory and its use in Langland's The Vision of Piers Plowman.
Medieval drama - origins, evolution from the trope. Medieval drama as Biblia pauperum. Pageant cycles - the method of staging, the participation of trade guilds. The influence of devotio moderna. Four great play cycles. Mystery (miracle) plays - why are they “mysteries”?. Other staging methods - place-and-scaffold, theatre-in-the round. Morality plays - the use of allegory, psychomachia.
English women mystics. Julian of Norwich - the experience of God and vision of the universe. Views on the nature of sin, the use of the terms “sensuality” and “substance”. God as Mother - the history of the idea, its expression in Julian's visions. Margery Kempe - her mystical experience, her fight to be allowed to take the vow of chastity, her mystical marriage to God. Affective piety and its role in Kempe's experience. The position of women visionaries in the medieval Church.
Sonnet - the history of the form. Sonnet sequence, corona sequence. Petrarchan/Italian sonnet vs. English sonnet - rhyme patterns, octave, sestet, couplet, volta. Gravita dolcezza. Wyatt and Surrey, their role in developing the English sonnet. Main themes.
Elizabethan theatre - origins, stage construction (thrust stage). Elizabethan drama - blank verse, revenge tragedy/tragedy of blood, Senecan influence. overreacher, hamartia, hubris. University Wits. Christopher Marlowe - main themes of his plays. Shakespeare's historical plays - two tetralogies, sources, the vision of history. Comedies: cross-dressing (gender bending), the story arc (from chaos to order). “Problem plays” and romances - the difference between them and comedies. Shakespeare's tragedies - the use of comical elements. NB: be able to name at least one title by Shakespeare as the example of all the genres listed above.
Thomas More's Utopia - the meaning of the title, the key tenets of Utopian social and political life, why was it written in Latin? Saturnalian quality of Utopia. Thomas Hoby's translation of Castiglione's The Courtier - sprezzatura as the quality of the ideal courtier, neoplatonic philosophy of love and “the ladder of love”. John Foxe's Acts and Monuments (a.k.a. The Book of Martyrs), the Bible in English and The Book of Common Prayer as the key texts of the English Reformation.