ENGL 23039 - Renaissance Bromance

Course Credit: 1
(WGSS)
This course considers why so much of Renaissance literature and culture is structured around a culture of aggressive male rivalry and bonding. As such we will discuss how this structure affects the representation of women-including women as the objects of male desire and as characters who masquerade as male knights. We will also look at how the genres and aesthetic programs of the works (plays, romances, prose fiction) change and influence representations of male rivalrous friendships. Readings will be focused not only on moments of rivalry within literary works, like Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso and Shakespeare and Fletcher’s Two Noble Kinsmen, but also on moments of rivalry between male writers of the period, such as the rivalry between William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson. [Before 1800] [AH]