Studies in Poetry: Gender and Lyric -- Renaissance Men and Women Writing about Love

Image of Shakespeare postage stamps with sonnet text overlaid.

Shakespeare postage stamps and text from Sonnet CXVI. (Image courtesy of Lori Novick-Carson.)

Instructor(s)

MIT Course Number

21L.704

As Taught In

Spring 2003

Level

Undergraduate

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Course Description

Course Features

Course Highlights

This course includes a list of related web links, which can be found in the related resources section.

Course Description

The core of this seminar will be the great sequences of English love sonnets written by William Shakespeare, Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, and Mary Wroth. These poems cover an enormous amount of aesthetic and psychological ground: ranging from the utterly subjective to the entirely public or conventional, from licit to forbidden desires, they might also serve as a manual of experimentation with the resources of sound, rhythm, and figuration in poetry. Around these sequences, we will develop several other contexts, using both Renaissance texts and modern accounts: the Petrarchan literary tradition (poems by Francis Petrarch and Sir Thomas Wyatt); the social, political, and ethical uses of love poetry (seduction, getting famous, influencing policy, elevating morals, compensating for failure); other accounts of ideal masculinity and femininity (conduct manuals, theories of gender and anatomy); and the other limits of the late sixteenth century vogue for love poetry: narrative poems, pornographic poems, poems that don't work.

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Related Content

Mary Fuller. 21L.704 Studies in Poetry: Gender and Lyric -- Renaissance Men and Women Writing about Love. Spring 2003. Massachusetts Institute of Technology: MIT OpenCourseWare, https://ocw.mit.edu. License: Creative Commons BY-NC-SA.


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