Module description
In the late twentieth century, Judith Butler focused critical attention on the body as the site where power intervenes to shape gender and sexuality. Nearly three decades after the publication of her influential work Bodies That Matter (1993), early modern critics and historians have increasingly argued that books – in the material sense of textual artefacts – also matter as another prime site of interpretation, as textual bodies where issues of identity, authenticity, gender, race, religion, and power were (and still are) fiercely debated.
This module will introduce you to key writings from early modern England, not just as brilliant and hugely influential literary texts, but as books – physical objects that were made, marketed, bought, and handled; whose layout, organisation, and publication history are vital parts of their existence. After all, as Jerome McGann puts it, texts are “embodied phenomena, and the body of the text is not exclusively linguistic.” As well as reading them as representatives of the poetical, dramatic, and prose achievements of early modern English literature, we will consider how the ways books are put together influences – or tries to influence – the reading experience.
The literature we study on this module is not just an abstract literary creation: it comes as a series of designed and built objects, encountered by their original readers in both print and manuscript. Just as much as we can tell something about the ideological and commercial interests of modern-day publishers from their publication lists, early modern publishers were highly specialized individuals who invested heavily in the matter of their books, not only because they thought the book would sell, but also to intervene in a public sphere where controversial ideas about religious orthodoxy, models of monarchical authority and leadership, sexual politics, and attitudes to cross-cultural encounters, to name but a few, were negotiated and often hotly contested.
Considering texts in this way, we find ourselves again and again in “thresholds of interpretation” (a term derived from the theorist Gérard Genette) – zones of transition and transaction which might at first seem merely appendages to our main object of study, but also strive to control our reading experience, and ultimately our interpretation of the texts they surround.
This module will be team-taught, so benefits from the expertise of multiple early modern scholars in the department, whose work covers poetry, drama, and prose of the period. Students on this module will be encouraged to consult special collections (i.e. rare books and manuscripts) at the British Library and Senate House Library, and your access to these collections will be facilitated. This is an amazing opportunity for book-lovers to get up close and personal with some truly remarkable texts.
Assessment details
1 x 1000 word mid-semester essay or equivalent length narrated PowerPoint and 1 x 3000 word end-semester essay (85%)
Educational aims & objectives
This course will introduce students to a wide range of literary writing in the early modern period (c.1550–1700) across a number of genres, and to some of the most recent and exciting scholarship that has understood that writing as part of the history of books. It aims to:
- Introduce students to some of the major authors of early modern England in their original print and manuscript contexts, using digital resources such as EEBO and using London resources such as Senate House Library Special Collections and the British Library to view original texts.
- Encourage students to consider the ways that physical textual artefacts were originally made and understand some of the cultural and economic factors underlying the production of books in the period.
- Equip students with the technical vocabulary for describing the various parts of a printed or manuscript book, including various kinds of paratextual material.
- Combine literary-critical and book-historical criticism, theory, and research methods to produce complex, multi-disciplinary readings of these important authors
Learning outcomes
At the end of the module students will have:
- developed a broad understanding of literary and print production in the period
- encountered a diverse body of literary texts from over a century of writing
- engaged with some of the most recent critical thinking and theory on this subject and been challenged to move between a variety of different critical approaches
- acquired a technical vocabulary appropriate for describing literary and print production
- used the subject matter to reflect on their own thinking and writing practices.
Teaching pattern
One 2-hour seminar, weekly