Description

Constructing Shakespeare as a lyric poet: the Sonnets and the canon, 1609-2021

Description

Shakespeare’s Sonnets is one of the most beloved poetic collections in the English language. It is widely seen as some the greatest poetry ever written both within and without the English-speaking world, as evidenced by the overwhelming wealth of scholarly works about it, not even mentioning the translations. Similarly, the sonnet is still largely seen today as representative of what poetry is, and never fails to find new adepts both among readers and among writers.

Such unanimous appreciation, however, is relatively recent in historical terms. This class will investigate the popularity of Shakespeare and of the sonnet throughout history. We will not just study how Shake-speares Sonnets (the original title of the 1609 quarto) came to be written and published, but also how the collection stands within the longer history of the sonnet in English, and how it acquired the status it has today. We will study some sonnets, but we will also discuss the way they have been read and interpreted, in the widest sense of the term (i.e. published, edited, commented upon, or even imitated) from the moment they were written to today, with a strong focus on book history.

We will explore how Shakespeare’s canonical status as an author and a person was constructed, and how such canon building had to do with specific cultural, social and political contexts and issues. The reception of Shakespeare will also serve as a pretext to (re)discover some aspects of literary history that often go beyond national boundaries. Students will be expected to read and analyse extracts from works of and about literature (their contents, but also sometimes their material features).

Bibliographie

1-Please acquire an edition of Shakespeare’s Sonnets of your choice. Most complete editions will do (but NOT  Wells and Edmondson’s All the Sonnets of Shakespeare, which is a different kind of edition). Good editions include (but are not limited to):

·       Colin Burrow (ed.), Shakespeare, the Complete Sonnets and Poems (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002)

·       Katherine Duncan-Jones (ed.), Shakespeare, The Sonnets, Arden Shakespeare edition (London: Thomas Nelson & Sons Ltd,1997)

·       Cathy Shrank & Raphael Lyne (eds), The Complete Poems of Shakespeare (Abingdon, New York: Routledge, 2018)

·       Helen Vendler, The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1997)

Extracts from other texts will be provided in class and / or made available on Moodle.

2-Some further reading (more references will be provided in class):

·       Faith Acker, First Readers of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, 1590-1790 (New York: Routledge, 2021)

·       Margreta de Grazia, Shakespeare Verbatim: The Reproduction of Authenticity and the 1790 apparatus (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991)

·       John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Chicago, London: Chicago University Press, 1993)

·       Jane Kingsley-Smith, The Afterlife of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019)

·       Arthur Marotti, Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric (Ithaca, London: Cornell University Press, 1995)

·       Jerome McGann, The Textual Condition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991)

Compétences requises

-to historicise literature (as a practice, an institution, and a subject of enquiry) and literary appreciation

-to gain better knowledge of literary history

-to initiate a reflection on the notion of literary canon and the development of literary fame

-to learn some of the basics of reception theory and of book history

Disciplines

• Études anglophones

Informations complémentaires

Contact: R. Vuillemin