ENGL33031 The Word: Performing, Reading, Writing the Bible

The Word: Performing, Reading, Writing the Bible (c. 1380-c. 1611)

ENGL 33031

Dr Anke Bernau

(2014-15)

 

 

Preliminary / Indicative Reading List

You will receive a course booklet containing most of the primary reading material for the course at the beginning of the semester. However, if you wish to begin your reading over the summer, which you are encouraged to do, you can do so with reference to the books and websites listed below, from which the primary texts studied will be taken.

 

Primary:

 

Note:

Please ensure you have a copy of the following edition of the King James Bible:

 

The Bible: King James with the Apocrypha, ed. by David Norton (Penguin, 2006).

 

Week 1: Beginnings

1.      Bede, The Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation, Book IV, Chapters XXIII [13] and XXIV [14]. Available at:

http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/basis/bede-book4.asp

2.      ‘Caedmon’s Hymn’, in The Norton Anthology of Poetry, 4^th edn (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1996), p. 1.

3.      ‘Prologue’ to the The Middle English Metrical Paraphrase of the Old Testament, ed. by Michael Livingstone. Available at TEAMS Middle English Texts online:

http://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/text/livingston-middle-english-metrical-paraphrase-of-the-old-testament-prologue

4.       King James Bible: All of the Book of Genesis.

 

Week 2: Transgression

1.      King James Bible: Genesis 2-5

2.      ‘York: The Fall of Man’, in  Greg Walker (ed.), Medieval Drama: An Anthology (London: Blackwell, 2000), pp. 21-4.

3.      ‘Chester: Adam and Eve’, in Greg Walker (ed.), Medieval Drama, pp. 25-31.

 

Week 3: Erasure

[Possible screening of ‘Noah’, dir. by Darren Aronofsky (2014)]

1.       King James Bible: Genesis 6-9

2.       Geoffrey Chaucer, ‘The Miller’s Prologue and Tale’, in The Canterbury Tales, in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. by Larry D. Benson, 3^rd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 66-77.

3.       ‘Chester: Noah’s Flood’, available at:

http://www.reed.utoronto.ca/chester/chester4.pdf

 

Week 4: Patience I

1.      Anon., Patience, in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, Cleanness, Patience, ed. by J. J. Anderson (London: Dent, 1996), ll. 1-244.

2.      King James Bible: Book of Jonah

 

Week 5: Patience II

1.      Patience, ll. 245-531

2.      King James Bible: Book of Job

3.       [You can also look at the story of Job in The Middle English Metrical Paraphrase of the Old Testament, available at TEAMS Middle English Texts online:

http://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/text/livingston-middle-english-metrical-paraphrase-of-the-old-testament-job

 

[Week 6: Reading Week]

 

Week 7: Idolatry

1.       Geoffrey Chaucer, ‘The Pardoner’s Introduction and Prologue’, in The Riverside Chaucer, pp. 193-96.

2.       John Gower, Confessio Amantis, Book 5, ll.  746-86; 1496-1959,

Available at TEAMS Middle English Texts online:

http://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/text/peck-gower-confessio-amantis-book-5#f4

 

Week 8: Translation

1.      Prologues / Prefaces to the Wycliffite Bible, the King James Bible and the Douay-Rheims Bible

 

Week 9: Women Old and New

1.       ‘Judith’, in The Middle English Metrical Paraphrase of the Old Testament, available at TEAMS online:

http://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/text/livingston-middle-english-metrical-paraphrase-of-the-old-testament-judith

2.       The N-Town play of the ‘Nativity’, ed. by Douglas Sugano. Available at TEAMS Middle English Texts online:

http://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/text/sugano-n-town-plays-play-15-nativity

3.      King James Bible: Old Testament: The Book of Judith; and New Testament: Matthew 1-7; Luke 1-4; John 1: 1-14.

 

Week 10: Passion

1.       ‘Mary at the Foot of the Cross’, in Middle English Marian Lyrics, ed. by Karen Saupe. See esp. Lyric 42.

This is a collecton of Marian lyrics: short poems concerning the Virgin Mary as she stands at the foot of the cross.  I will choose a selection of these for the course booklet, but you can have a look at them more generally.

Available at TEAMS Middle English Texts Online:

http://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/text/saupe-middle-english-marian-lyrics-mary-at-the-foot-of-the-cross

2.       ‘The Crucifixion (York)’, Available at Luminarium online:

http://www.wwnorton.com/college/english/nael/noa/pdf/YORKPLAY.pdf       

3.       King James Bible: New Testament , Matthew 24-28 ; Mark 13-16 ; Luke 21-24 ; John 16-21.

 

Week 11: Course Revision

 

 

 

Sam Jones  l English Literature, American Studies and Creative Writing Programmes Administrator| 

The School of Arts, Languages & Cultures l  Room W113 Samuel Alexander Building |The University of Manchester |Oxford Road Manchester, M13 9PL |  Tel. +44 (0) 161 275 8590|

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ENGL33021: Lord Byron

ENGL33021: Lord Byron

Syllabus and Preliminary Reading

2014-15

 

The syllabus for this course will run as follows. Many of the texts can be comfortably read in a week. Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and Don Juan, however, cannot and you should try to read these over the summer, especially Don Juan. The recommended editions of Byron’s works are Jerome McGann (ed.), Byron: The Major Works (Oxford University Press, 2008) and Susan J. Wolfson and Peter J. Manning (eds), Lord Byron: Selected Poems (Penguin, 1996). You will need to get hold of both of these editions. You should also get a copy of Leslie Marchand, Byron: A Portrait (Pimlico, 1993), and read the relevant chapters alongside the set texts each week (or, better still, read this over the summer). Some recommended introductory reading follows the syllabus below. See you in the autumn!

 

Syllabus

 

Week 1  - Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Cantos I and II

Week 2  - The Corsair and Lara

Week 3  - Manfred

Week 4  - Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Cantos III and IV

Week 5  - Beppo

[Week 6 - Reading Week]

Week 7  -  Don Juan, Cantos I-VI

Week 8  - Sardanapalus

Week 9  - Don Juan, Cantos VII-XII

Week 10 - Cain

Week 11 - Don Juan, Cantos XIII-XVII

Week 12 - The Vision of Judgement

 

Recommended Preliminary Secondary Reading

 

Bernard Beatty, Byron’s Don Juan and Other Poems (Penguin, 1987)

Drummond Bone, Byron (Northcote House, 2000)

Drummond Bone (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Byron (Cambridge University Press, 2004)

Caroline Franklin, Byron (Routledge, 2006)

Robert Gleckner and Bernard Beatty (eds), The Plays of Lord Byron: Critical Essays (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1997)

Andrew Keanie, Student Guide to Byron (Greenwich Exchange, 2006)

Richard Lansdown, The Cambridge Introduction to Byron (Cambridge University Press, 2012)

Alan Rawes, Byron’s Poetic Experimentation (Ashgate, 2000)

Jane Stabler (ed.), Palgrave Advances in Byron Studies (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007)

 

 

ENGL 31761: Revenge Tragedy: Wild Justice on the English Renaissance Stage

ENGL 31761: Revenge Tragedy: Wild Justice on the English Renaissance Stage

 

Primary reading

 

Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy

Shakespeare, Hamlet

Middleton(?), The Revenger’s Tragedy

Webster, The Duchess of Malfi

Webster, The White Devil

Middleton, Women Beware Women

Middleton and Rowley, The Changeling

Ford, ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore

 

All of the primary texts apart from Hamlet are in David Bevington (ed.), English Renaissance Drama: A Norton Anthology (W. W. Norton, 2002).

 

For Hamlet, I recommend either the Arden edition, eds Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor or the Oxford edition, ed. G. R. Hibbard.

 

Suggested Background Reading

 

Fredson Thayer Bowers, Elizabethan Revenge Tragedy, 1587-1642 (1959)

Michael Neill, ‘English Revenge Tragedy’, Rebecca Bushnell (ed), A Companion to Tragedy (2005)

Janet Clare, Revenge Tragedies of the Renaissance (2006)

Eugene D. Hill, ‘Revenge Tragedy’, A Companion to Renaissance Drama ed. Arthur F. Kinney (2002)

Stevie Simkin, Revenge Tragedy: A Casebook (2001)

John Kerrigan, Revenge Tragedy: Aeschylus to Armageddon (1997)

Tanya Pollard, ‘Tragedy and revenge’, The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Tragedy eds Emma Smith and Garrett A. Sullivan Jr (2010).

 

 

 

Sam Jones  l English Literature, American Studies and Creative Writing Programmes Administrator| 

The School of Arts, Languages & Cultures l  Room W113 Samuel Alexander Building |The University of Manchester |Oxford Road Manchester, M13 9PL |  Tel. +44 (0) 161 275 8590|

EAS blog

Working hours:

Monday                 8.00-4.00

Tuesday                 8.00-4.00

Wednesday          1.30-5

 

ENGL31622 Things that Talk: Nonhuman Voices in Anglo-Saxon Literature and Culture

Things that Talk: Nonhuman Voices in Anglo-Saxon Literature and Culture

Dr James Paz

 

Anglo-Saxon ‘things’ could talk. Nonhuman voices leap out from the Old English riddles, telling us where they came from, how they were made, what they do. Readers of The Dream of the Rood will come across a tree possessing the voice of a dreaming human in order to talk about its own history. In Andreas, we read about stone angels, emerging from the wall into which they have been carved, walking and speaking and raising the dead. Away from the manuscript page, we find inscribed artefacts (swords, rings, brooches, caskets) that use their voices to remind us of their makers and owners, while others want to talk about themselves instead of the humans who crafted them, recalling their former fate as living creatures.

 

This module asks students to consider how nonhumans might be as active and talkative as humans are in the earliest English literature and culture. We will question how far we can stretch critical concepts such as ‘voice’ and ‘agency’ before they break or fail. We will rethink ideas about the animate and inanimate; the differences between human, animal and artefactual bodies; the relation between human speech and nonhuman sounds; and what separates the manmade from the natural, the owned from the autonomous.

 

Primary Texts

 

All texts will be read in translation, but students will be encouraged to engage with relevant passages of Old English under the guidance of their seminar leader. The recent poetic anthology, The Word Exchange (2011), containing OE texts and facing-page translations, is highly recommended. A standard anthology of Old English literature in translation such as Kevin Crossley Holland’s The Anglo-Saxon World or Craig Williamson’s Beowulf and Other Old English Poems is required. Handouts will be provided where texts are not widely available.

Further Reading

 

This is a list of secondary and therefore non-compulsory reading

 

Bitterli, Dieter, Say What I Am Called: The Old English Riddles of the Exeter Book and the Anglo-Latin Riddle Tradition (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009).

Bredehoft, Thomas A., ‘First-Person Inscriptions and Literacy in Anglo-Saxon England’, ASSAH 9 (1996), 103-10.

Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome, ed. Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Ethic and Objects (Washington DC: Oliphaunt Books, 2012).

Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome, ‘Stories of Stone’, in Postmedieval: A Journal of Medieval Cultural Studies 1/2 (Spring/Summer 2010), 56-63.

Garner, Lori Ann, ‘Anglo-Saxon Charms in Performance’, Oral Tradition 19:1 (March 2004): 20-42.

Hanawalt, Barbara A. and Lisa J. Kiser, eds. Engaging with Nature: Essays on the Natural World in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (University of Notre Dame Press, 2008).

Karkov, Catherine E., The Art of Anglo-Saxon England (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2011).

Kay, Sarah, ‘Legible Skins: Animals and the Ethics of Medieval Reading’, Postmedieval: A Journal of Medieval Cultural Studies 2/1 (2011), 13-32.

Leahy, Kevin, and Roger Bland, The Staffordshire Hoard (London: British Museum Press, 2009).

Liuzza, R. M., ed. Old English Literature: Critical Essays (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2002).

Murphy, Patrick J., Unriddling the Exeter Riddles (University Park, PA: Penn State Press, 2011)

Niles, John D., Old English Enigmatic Poems and the Play of the Texts (Turnhout: Brepolis, 2006).

Pasternack, Carol Braun, The Textuality of Old English Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

Paz, James, ‘Æschere’s Head, Grendel’s Mother and the Sword that Isn’t A Sword: Unreadable Things in Beowulf’, Exemplaria 25:3 (Fall 2013), 231-51.

Robertson, Kellie, ‘Medieval Materialism: A Manifesto’, Exemplaria 22:2 (2010), 99-118.

Robertson, Kellie, ‘Medieval Things: Materiality, Historicism, and the Premodern Object’, Literature Compass 5/6 (2008), 1060-1080.

Steel, Karl, How to Make a Human: Animals and Violence in the Middle Ages (Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 2011).

Webster, Leslie, Objects in Focus: The Franks Casket (London: British Museum Press, 2012).

 

 

 

 

Sam Jones  l English Literature, American Studies and Creative Writing Programmes Administrator| 

The School of Arts, Languages & Cultures l  Room W113 Samuel Alexander Building |The University of Manchester |Oxford Road Manchester, M13 9PL |  Tel. +44 (0) 161 275 8590|

EAS blog

Working hours:

Monday                 8.00-4.00

Tuesday                 8.00-4.00

Wednesday          1.30-5

 

ENGL31252 LOL: The Serious Business of Comedy in Fiction, Theatre, and Film

LOL: The Serious Business of Comedy in Fiction, Theatre, and Film (ENGL 31252) Semester 2, 2014-15

 

Course description

In this interdisciplinary course, we will examine how British and American novelists, playwrights and filmmakers have turned to comedy and humour from the eighteenth century to the present day.  Charting a range of literary and cultural representations, we will explore the political, social and ideological uses of a range of comedic expressions—such as the joke, black comedy, satire, camp humour, the lampoon, sitcom, screwball comedy, and romcom—in relation to issues of love, marriage, sex, sexuality, gender, the sexed body, race, nation, ethnicity, age, class, and city vs. country.

 

Preparatory Reading List (with recommended editions)

John Gay, The Beggar’s Opera and Polly, ed. Hal Gladfelder (Oxford World’s Classics edition, ISBN 978-0199642229)

Oliver Goldsmith, She Stoops to Conquer (Dover Thrift edition, ISBN 978-0486268675)

Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest, ed. Michael Patrick Gillespie (Norton Critical edition, ISBN 978-0393927535)

E. F. Benson, Queen Lucia, in The Complete Mapp and Lucia, volume 1 (Wordsworth Classics edition, ISBN 978-1840226737)

Caryl Churchill, Cloud 9 (available online: http://www.dramaonlinelibrary.com/plays/cloud-nine-iid-14838/do-9781408162934-div-00000109

 

Fay Weldon, The Life and Loves of a She-Devil (Sceptre edition, ISBN 978-0340589359)

Simon Critchley, On Humour (Routledge, ISBN 978-0415251211)

 

 

Sam Jones  l English Literature, American Studies and Creative Writing Programmes Administrator| 

The School of Arts, Languages & Cultures l  Room W113 Samuel Alexander Building |The University of Manchester |Oxford Road Manchester, M13 9PL |  Tel. +44 (0) 161 275 8590|

EAS blog

Working hours:

Monday                 8.00-4.00

Tuesday                 8.00-4.00

Wednesday          1.30-5

 

ENGL31241 Crossing Over with Tilda Swinton

Crossing Over with Tilda Swinton (ENGL 31241)

Reading and Viewing List

Jackie Stacey, EAC

 

Summary Outline

Block 1: From Androgyny to Transgender

Films to view: Orlando, Female Perversions, The Stars (Are Out Tonight)

This first section of the course will examine Swinton’s performance of gender and sexuality through an analysis of feminist and queer theories of subversion, masquerade and transformation. Engaging with critical texts in feminist and queer theory (B. Ruby Rich, Judith Butler, Judith Halberstam, Mary Ann Doane, Amelia Jones and Lizbeth Goodman) this section of the course will introduce students to debates about gendered narratives, sexual performativities and constructions of femininity and masculinity as genre and myth.

Block 2: Affect and Interiority

Films to view: The Deep End, Thumbsucker, I am Love, We Need to Talk About Kevin, The Maybe

This second block of the course will approach Swinton’s work in relation to myths and fantasies about the woman’s body as the site of sensation and emotionality. In dialogue with the debates about the history of women’s genres (such as the maternal melodrama) in mainstream cinema, we shall examine the place of affect and interiority in Swinton’s work. Read through current queer debates about affect (Ann Cvetkovich, Robyn Wiegman) and about paranoid and reparative reading practices (Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick), this block of the course will examine Swinton’s performance style in relation to the expression of affect and the implication of feminine interiority that has been long debated in feminist film theory.

Block 3: Collaborations and Contexts

Films to view: The Last of England; Edward II;  Blue; Derek

This part of the course pushes students to consider a less individualised reading of Swinton, by emphasising her collaborations and shared interventions. Taking case studies of those named above, these sessions will explore the lack of literature on colloborative cultural practices and test new models for reading Swinton beyond conventional star studies. 1980s Thatcherism will provide a context for the work with Jarman in order to approach the methodological limits of academic practices of ‘contextualisation’; the disappearance of venues for screening art films will provide the ‘context’ for studying Swinton’s collaborations with Cousins, such as ‘The Pilgrimage’ and Ballerina Ballroom, Cinema of Dreams’).

Block 4: Non-human/other worldly

Teknolust; The Chronicles of Narnia; Possible Worlds; Constantine;

This final section of the course will examine Swinton’s capacity to embody the non-human, the technological and the animal. It examines critical readings that emphasise the ‘other worldliness’ of her performances and relates these to debates about imitation, impersonation and masquerade with which the course will begin. Embedding these readings of Swinton’s ‘deviant’ embodiments in changing modes of technological mediation, the course will conclude by contrasting claims about liveness and authenticity with Swinton’s performance of new digital genetic transformations of the biological body.

 

Books:

Bainbridge, Caroline, A Feminine Cinematics: Luce Irigaray, Women and Film (Basingstoke ; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008)

 

Butler, Alison, Women’s Cinema: The Contested Screen (London: Wallflower Press,

                2002)

 

Butler, Judith, Gender Trouble (London: Routledge 2000)

 

Doane, Mary Ann, Femme Fatales (London: Routledge 1991)

 

Halberstam, Judith, Female Masculinity Durham , NC ; London: Duke University

                Press, 2006)

 

Jones, Amelia, and Adrian Heathfield, eds, Perform, Repeat, Record: Live Art in History (Bristol: Intellect, 2012)

 

Julien, Isaac and others, Derek Jarman: Brutal Beauty (London: Koenig Books, 2008)

 

Potter, Sally, Naked Cinema: Working with Actors (London: Faber and Faber,

                2014)

 

Rich, B. Ruby, New Queer Cinema: The Director's Cut (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013)

 

Articles:

Brabazon, Tara, 'Reading Tilda. A Swinton Guide through Bodily Textualisation', Social Semiotics, 4 (1994), 9-30

 

Degli-Esposti, Cristina, 'Sally Potter's "Orlando" and the Neo-Baroque Scopic Regime', Cinema Journal, 36 (1996), 75-93

 

Fowler, Catherine, 'Spending Time with (a) Celebrity: Sam Taylor-Wood's Video Portrait of David Beckham', in Framing Celebrity: New Directions in Celebrity Culture, ed. by Su Holmes and Sean Redmond (London ; New York: Routledge, 2006), pp. 241-52 [p. 47].

 

Goode, Ian, 'Cinema in the Country: The Rural Cinema Scheme–Orkney (1946-67)', Post Script: Essays in Film and the Humanities, 30 (2011), 17-31

 

Halberstam, Judith, 'Looking Butch: A Rough Guide to Butches on Film ', in Female Masculinity (Durham , NC ; London: Duke University Press, 2006), pp. pp. 175-230 [pp.13-4].

 

Mackinney-Valentin, Maria, 'Face Value: Subversive Beauty Ideals in Contemporary Fashion Marketing', Fashion, Style & Popular Culture, 1 (2013), 13-27

 

McGill, Hannah, 'Film Festivals: A View from the Inside', Screen, 52 (2011), 280-

                85

 

Mignon, Nixon, 'Dream Dust', October, 116 (2006), 63-86

 

 

Palmer, Landon, 'Re-Collecting David Bowie: The Next Day and Late-Career Stardom', Celebrity Studies, 4 (2013), 384-86

 

Pidduck, Julianne, 'Travels with Sally Potter's Orlando: Gender, Narrative, Movement', Screen, 38 (1997), 172-89

 

Richardson, Niall, 'The Queer Performance of Tilda Swinton in Derek Jarman's Edward Ii: Gay Male Misogyny Reconsidered', Sexualities, 6 (2003), 427-42

 

Swinton, Tilda, and Lizbeth Goodman, 'Subverting Images of the Female', New

Theatre Quarterly, 6 (1990), 215-28

 

Swinton, Tilda, 'Film: State of Cinema Address: 49th San Francisco International Film Festival, 29 April 2006', Critical Quarterly, 48 (2006), 110-20

 

Swinton, Tilda, 'Tilda Swinton's Dinner Speech at the Opening of David Bowie Is',

V&A Network, (2013) <http://www.vam.ac.uk/b/blog/va-network/tilda-swintons-dinner-speech-opening-david-bowie?sf10717152=1> [Accessed 21 November 2013]

 

 

 

 

Sam Jones  l English Literature, American Studies and Creative Writing Programmes Administrator| 

The School of Arts, Languages & Cultures l  Room W113 Samuel Alexander Building |The University of Manchester |Oxford Road Manchester, M13 9PL |  Tel. +44 (0) 161 275 8590|

EAS blog

Working hours:

Monday                 8.00-4.00

Tuesday                 8.00-4.00

Wednesday          1.30-5

 

ENGL31231 - Contemporary Short Fiction

ENGL31231 - Contemporary Short Fiction

 

Lydia Davis, The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis (2009)

Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010)

Hilary Mantel, The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher (2014)

Lorrie Moore, Birds of America (1998)

Alice Munro, Beggar Maid: Stories of Flo & Rose (1977)

Alice Munro, Dear Life (2012)

Ali Smith, Artful (2012)

 

One contemporary short story anthology of your choice.

 

 

 

 

Sam Jones  l English Literature, American Studies and Creative Writing Programmes Administrator| 

The School of Arts, Languages & Cultures l  Room W113 Samuel Alexander Building |The University of Manchester |Oxford Road Manchester, M13 9PL |  Tel. +44 (0) 161 275 8590|

EAS blog

Working hours:

Monday                 8.00-4.00

Tuesday                 8.00-4.00

Wednesday          1.30-5

 

ENGL31212 Transnational Shakespeare: Texts, Places, Identities

Transnational Shakespeare: Texts, Places, Identities

Dr Fred Shurink

Shakespeare lived in an age that witnessed rapidly expanding overseas trade, an influx of immigrants into London, the widespread importation, translation, and imitation of contemporary European and ancient Greek and Roman books, overseas exploration and encounters with other civilizations and races, increasingly troubled relations between the four ‘British’ nations (England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland), religious wars with the Continent and the threat of foreign invasion. This course will explore early modern England’s lively and diverse transnational culture in relation to a wide range of Shakespeare’s plays, from histories to tragedies, and from problem plays to Roman plays. We will look at the presentation of foreign languages and characters on the stage, Shakespeare’s appropriation of foreign-language texts (both ancient and modern), and the plays’ use of foreign settings. We will also read the plays alongside a variety of foreign-language texts in translation, from language manuals to travel accounts, from Italian tales to Roman histories, and from treatises on European politics to essays on the New World. In so doing, the course invites you to examine the tension between England’s new self-assertiveness as a nation and an empire and the interrelations and interdependencies which existed between England and a range of foreign cultures in the early modern period. Exploring a variety of national, racial, religious, political, class, and gender identities within the plays, the course will encourage students to interrogate such concepts as ‘nation’, ‘language’, and ‘English literature’ in relation to England’s most iconic writer, William Shakespeare.

 

Primary Reading

 

These are the primary texts that we will be studying

 

Week 1. Introduction: Global Shakespeare from the Renaissance to the Present

 

Week 2. English Lessons: Henry V

 

Week 3. England’s Borders: Richard II

 

Week 4. French Words: All’s Well That Ends Well

 

Week 5. Italian Tales and English Protestantism: Measure for Measure

 

Week 6. Reading week

 

Week 7. Global Trade and Religious Conflict: The Merchant of Venice

 

Week 8. Barbary and Barbarity: Othello

 

Week 9. Learning from Ovid: Titus Andronicus

 

Week 10. Exemplary Romans: Julius Caesar

 

Week 11. The Translation of Empire: Antony and Cleopatra

 

Week 12. Ethnocentrism: The Tempest

 

Indicative Reading

This is a selection of secondary reading for the course and is, of course, not compulsory.

Baker, David J., Between Nations: Shakespeare, Spenser, Marvell and the Question of Britain (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997)

Baker, David J. and Willy Maley, eds., British Identities and English Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002)

Burrow, Colin, Shakespeare and Classical Antiquity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013)

Delabastita, Dirk and Ton Hoenselaars, eds., Multilingualism in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries, Special issue of English Text Construction, 6. 1 (2013)

Fuchs, Barbara, The Poetics of Piracy: Emulating Spain in English Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013)

Hadfield, Andrew, Literature, Travel, and Colonial Writing in the English Renaissance, 1545-1625 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998)

Hadfield, Andrew, and Paul Hammond, eds, Shakespeare and Renaissance Europe (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2005)

Helgerson, Richard, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1995)

James, Heather, Shakespeare’s Troy: Drama, Politics, and the Translation of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997)

Lawrence, Jason, ‘Who the devil taught thee so much Italian?’: Italian Language Learning and Literary Imitation in Early Modern England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005)

Maley, Willy and Margaret Tudeau-Clayton, eds., This England, That Shakespeare: New Angles on Englishness and the Bard (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010)

Marrapodi, Michele, ed., Shakespeare and the Italian Renaissance: Appropriation, Transformation, Opposition (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015)

Matar, Nabil, Britain and Barbary, 1589-1689 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005)

Parker, Patricia, Shakespeare from the Margins: Language, Culture, Context (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996)

Saenger, Michael, Shakespeare and the French Borders of English (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2013)

Saenger, Michael, ed., Interlinguicity, Internationality, and Shakespeare (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014)

Sousa, Geraldo, Shakespeare’s Cross-Cultural Encounters (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2002)

Vitkus, Daniel J., Turning Turk: English Theater and the Multicultural Mediterranean, 1570-1630 (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2003)

 

 

 

 

Sam Jones  l English Literature, American Studies and Creative Writing Programmes Administrator| 

The School of Arts, Languages & Cultures l  Room W113 Samuel Alexander Building |The University of Manchester |Oxford Road Manchester, M13 9PL |  Tel. +44 (0) 161 275 8590|

EAS blog

Working hours:

Monday                 8.00-4.00

Tuesday                 8.00-4.00

Wednesday          1.30-5

 

Radical turns: culture and politics in the 1930s (2014-15)

Radical turns: culture and politics in the 1930s (2014-15)

 

Primary Texts:

Katharine Burdekin, Swastika Night (1937; New York: Feminist Press, 1985)

Christopher Isherwood, Mr Norris Changes Trains (1935; London: Vintage, 2001)

Lewis Jones, Cwmardy and We Live (1937, 1939; Cardigan: Library of Wales, 2006)

Louis MacNeice, Autumn Journal (1939; London: Faber & Faber, 2013)

Mass Observation, Britain (1939; London: Faber & Faber, 2009)

Robin Skelton (ed), Thirties Poetry ( London: Penguin, 2000)

Sylvia Townsend Warner, Summer will Show (1936; New York: NYRB, 2009)

George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (1937; London: Penguin, 2001)

Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts (1941; London: Penguin, 1992)

 

Preliminary Secondary Reading:

Piers Brendon, Dark Valley: a Panorama of the 1930s (London: Pimlico, 2001)

Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker (eds), The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, Volume 1, Britain and Ireland, 1880-1955 (Oxford: OUP, 2009)

Valentine Cunningham, British Writers of the Thirties (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988)

James Hinton, The Mass Observers: a History 1937-49 (Oxford: OUP, 2013)

Chris Hopkins, English Fiction in the 1930s: Language, Genre, History (London: Continuum, 2006)

Richard Overy, The Morbid Age: Britain and the Crisis in Civilisation, 1919-1939 (London: Penguin, 2010)

James Smith, British Writers and MI5 Surveillance, 1930-60 (Cambridge: CUP, 2012)

 

 

 

 

 

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