2023-2024 Academic Catalog
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ENG 355 - Studies in the Renaissance Pulp Non-Fiction: Representations of Domestic Crime in Early Modern England
This seminar will examine representations of real life domestic murders in England circa 1550-1650, with a view to how a disrupted household threatened political ideologies characterizing the family as a microcosmic state. Over the course of the semester, we will read chronicle accounts of various crimes alongside the broadside ballads, prose pamphlets, and theatrical tragedies they inspired. In doing so, we will interrogate the enduring taste for sensationalist reportage in uncertain times, and consider parallels between these materials and the rhetoric surrounding such crimes in our own historical moment, especially in relation to female victims and perpetrators. Assigned texts will include Medea, Arden of Faversham, A Yorkshire Tragedy, The White Devil, various ephemera, and modern literary criticism.
This course can be repeated with a different topic
Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor.
Anticipated Terms Offered: Periodically
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