Beginnings: The Story of English Literature Before 1700

There is no single beginning to the story of Literature in English. The literary arts of the British Isles between the 10th and 17th centuries rise from tangled roots: mass migrations, linguistic and cultural borrowings, political and religious crises, colonial occupations, and philosophical revolutions. The bewildering variety of literary artforms from these centuries challenge modern notions of history and fiction, spirituality and the secular, selfhood and society. Reading widely across this long period, students will consider what it means to tell the story of literary history: whose voices count? Who gets left out? How does our sense of the past shape our present, and vice versa?