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In the 16th and 17th century, place acquires new political and cultural dimensions in the shift from feudalism to absolutism. Not only do the latter’s strategies of representation rely heavily on the political usage of space and place, but English absolutism and its imperial expansion conditioned a vastly different cultural geography. London turned into a colonial metropolis and power became increasingly centred at Court, while the rural areas saw threatening reformations. Epistemologically, on the other hand, there is a new sense of placeness, of the empirical and experiential importance of place. Instead of being a mere projection for moral and ethical ideas, place is increasingly understood in terms of situatedness and of the interplay between material and symbolic dimensions. These aspects are not only reflected in a poetry that is still essentially a poetry of patronage, but poetry is a crucial medium for the negotiation of early-modern conceptions of place and its cultural values. The course will look at different configurations of place and their constellations of poetry, selfhood and politics ranging from the astonishing treatment of London’s urban space in Isabella Whitney, the architectural religious poetry of George Herbert or the poetry of royalist retreat during the Civil Wars to the new genres of topographical and country house poetry with such paradigmatic representatives as Ben Jonson, Aemilia Lanyer and Andrew Marvell.
Primary texts will be provided in electronic form on moodle. |
