In this BA seminar we will explore the genre of the country house poem in early modern English literature. Most literary critics, following G. R. Hibbard’s outline of the genre (1956), describe country house poetry as a form that depicts utopian worlds of “harmonious totality and proto-egalitarianism” (Marin 53). However, the unities of the country house poem can be said to be manufactured utopias – carefully constructed façades concealing the actual, hierarchical disunities of early modern English society. While texts such as Ben Jonson’s "To Penshurst" (1616) or Aemilia Lanyer’s "The Description of Cooke-Ham" (1611) appear to present an egalitarian, open social system where all inhabitants of the house eat the same fare and sit at the lord’s table, they actually tend to reinscribe the dominant hierarchies of late Elizabethan and Jacobean England through the illusion of social harmony and the sanctioning of physical, formal, and topographical restriction. In this course we will, therefore, not only cover general approaches to the reading and formal aspects of poetry but also take into account the historical context(s) of early modern England. Within this framework, we will look at how different poems and poets address notions of community, class, place, gender, or proto-ecology, exploring how the texts negotiate concepts of the real and the ideal, outside and inside, or the reciprocity of man and nature. Our focus will be on poems written in the seventeenth century, when the genre flourished; however, we will also consider both earlier and later examples, spanning from Geoffrey Whitney’s “To Richard Cotton, Esq.” (1586) to Alexander Pope’s “Epistle to Burlington” (1731) and, finally, to traces of the genre in more recent fictional texts.
- Dozent/in: Nadine Schmidt