English 9155
Animals and the Environment in Early Modern Literature
Instructor: Professor Madeline Bassnett.
Fall Half Course.
This course engages with the current critical interest in animal studies, ecocriticism, and climate studies to investigate the poetry, prose, and drama of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Texts include: Shakespeare’s King Lear and As You Like It; country house poems such as Ben Jonson’s “To Penshurst”; and Margaret Cavendish’s anti-hunting poems and her early sci-fi prose work, The Blazing World, which depicts a land peopled with human/animal hybrids. Living through the era of climate change known as the Little Ice Age, the early moderns, like us, confronted ecological challenges such as war, population growth, famine, and early industrialization, all of which likewise affected human/nonhuman relationships. To help us draw analogies between past and present experience, this course will integrate critical, historical, and contemporary theoretical approaches.
