WGS.2014 Renaissance Women
In this course, students will explore writing by and about women in the English Renaissance. Beginning with work written in the late-sixteenth century and ending with that written in the seventeenth century, this class covers a range of genres and authors, including poetry, prose, plays, letters, and autobiography. The course will give students a substantial overview of the kinds of writing that women did in the English Renaissance and how women's writing developed over the course of a century. The class offers students a critical framework for thinking about genre as a category of study as well as about ideas of authorship and originality. In addition, students will become proficient at reading literary forms and writing analytical papers; in their writing, students will focus especially on making claims and supporting those claims with appropriate textual evidence and citations.