ENL 5227-Fall 2025-Hand

This course focuses on animals and animality in early modern English literature. Reading an array of texts, including drama and poetry as well as selections from contemporary popular works such as animal husbandry manuals, cookbooks, natural histories, emblems, almanacs, broadside ballads, and more, we’ll consider how early modern humans were “thinking with animals” and how they lived among and experienced the creaturely world. We will also think about animality and otherness. What does literature reveal about how early modern people differentiated between human and other-than-human lives - about what it means to be human or animal? How is animality mapped onto human bodies and to what effect? Conversely, are animals humanized or anthropomorphized? How does animality converge with other categories of difference or disqualification? How do animal tropes shape early modern literature? To what extent is “the animal” a literary and dramatic invention? (To what extent is “the human”?)

Our practice will be grounded in careful close reading of primary texts, but accompanying readings in early modern cultural contexts as well as secondary and theoretical work in early modern animal studies, posthumanism, disability studies, and more will provide foundations and frameworks for approaching our texts.

Course assignments may include regular discussion posts, presentations, and leading discussion. For the culminating project, participants will identify a call for papers or site of publication and produce a piece of original scholarship which may be presented as a conference paper or developed into a publishable article.

Requirements: This course satisfies the general literature requirement for one course pre-1660 or for one course pre-1800. It also satisfies the requirement for coursework in the following Areas of Concentration: Medieval and Early Modern British Literary and Cultural Studies (through 1660); a Literary Genre (Drama); a Literary Genre (Poetry).