Seminar: The 17th Century

3 units

This seminar takes as its subject the writings of Andrew Marvell and the literary culture from which and in relation to which those writings emerged. We shall ask, for example, what Marvell's "Coy Mistress" has to do with the carpe diem poetry of his cavalier contemporaries and in what ways Marvell's mowers and virgins keep company with the shepherds and maidens of contemporary pastoral and romance. And when Marvell turned his attention to emergent heroes in the 1650s, we shall want to know how this poetry of public affairs, The Horatian Ode and The First Anniversary, fits together with contemporary verse on similar occasions: with Royalist traditions of praise and panegyric and with contemporary celebrations of an emergent Republican state. This seminar will be an occasion to read poetry and prose of the mid-17th-century England, and especially of its greatest lyric poet, and to consider the sociality of that writing and the meaning of literary intertextuality.