Course Level: Graduate

Seminar in Renaissance and Seventeenth Century Literature (3)

Religion/Revolution/Exile in 17th Century English Literature

This seminar investigates "formations of the secular" in seventeenth-century literature. The secular has become a renewed object of study in recent years, as the world-wide revival of religion has caused scholars to reexamine the long-standing association of secularity with a religious decline linked to modernity. Can religion and secularity co-exist? Events today suggest they can. Traditional narratives of secularization, however, often argue that the privatization of religion began with the intellectual, political, and religious tumult attendant on the Age of Discovery in seventeenth-century Europe. The seminar tests notions of the secular, such as toleration for diversity and freedom of speech, against a variety of literary case studies dealing with religion, politics, and gender, especially as these literary works express hopes for and frustrations with a re-imagined future. To study the interplay of secularity and religious faith, the class reads John Donne (Satire 3, the Holy Sonnets), Francis Bacon (The New Atlantis), John Milton (Areopagitica and Samson Agonistes), Margaret Cavendish (The Blazing World, The Convent of Pleasure), and Andrew Marvell, among others.