Altered States

A course about ecstasy, rapture, transport, travel, mysticism, metamorphosis, and magic in pre- and early modern verse, drama, and prose, including: Ovid ( Metamorphoses ), Shakespeare ( A Midsummer Night's Dream ; Othello ), Marlowe ( Dr. Faustus ), Mandeville's Travels ; the writings of the medieval female mystics Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe; the ecstatic verse of Crashaw, and the erotic, at times pornographic, verse of Donne, Herrick, Carew, Rochester, and Behn.