English Literature: Renaissance and Eighteenth-Century Literature

Entry requirements

You will need a good 2:1 Honours degree in English studies or a similar subject.

Months of entry

September

Course content

The Renaissance and the eighteenth century are two of the richest periods in English literature, as well as areas in which some of the most exciting new critical and textual scholarship has been concentrated. The relations between these periods are made especially close by the conflicts as well as the continuities that can be traced between them.

All the major writers of the eighteenth century were passionate readers of Shakespeare, Jonson, Milton and Spenser, with some publishing major editions of their works. Yet Pope and Swift, Dryden and Johnson saw themselves not just as the inheritors of their literary forebears, but as their masters, correcting and improving the literature of the Tudor and Stuart eras before them, as the products of a golden but unrefined age. What is at stake in the mighty contests that arise from the great works and the cultural shifts of the Renaissance and the eighteenth century is the development of ‘English Literature’ itself.

Conversation with other students and researchers through departmental talks, seminars, conferences, and associated research centres such as the Liverpool Medieval and Renaissance Research Centre and the Eighteenth-Century Worlds Centre will help you situate that reading within a thriving academic context.