CHRONOLOGICAL VIEW OF SYLLABUS

• The Bronze Age and Classical Greek Period--

• The Roman Empire--

• The Middle English Period--begins roughly in 1100, when Old English syntax and Norman French vocabulary (with Latin borrowings) emerged as a language with which the conquered and conquerors could communicate.  Middle English existed in four main dialects based on the tribal population of the conquered Britons: the Jutes spoke Kentish (south of London), the Saxons spoke West Saxon, and the Angles of the northlands spoke Mercian in the Midlands and Northumbrian north of the Humber River.  Middle English slipped gradually into Early Modern English between Chaucer's death (c. 1400) and 1500, when the centralized political and commercial power of London made its East Midlands dialect more desireable than the other dialects.  Printing, introduced in 1476 and strongly localized around Westminster and London, also helped to establish a single dialect (and spelling!) as correct.  The final, and perhaps most obvious reason why London's East Midlands dialect became standard English was that it was the dialect of Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, John Lydgate, and Thomas Hoccleve, the four most widely-read writers in Middle English and most commonly published authors in the first twenty-five years of printing.

• The Early Modern English Period--begins around 1500 (see above) when Tudor imperial ambitions, the rise of Humanist educational and scholarly practices, and the increase of English international trade, led to a wild increase in new words entering the language, especially from Italian, French, Spanish, and various Amerindian langauges.   The Early Modern period lasts roughly until 1650 when the Puritan revolution  led to increased public literacy rates, encouraged by the end of royal censorship of the press, and the development of a less learned, "public" rhetorical style.  Scientific communications, though often initially in Latin, also contributed to a shift to a plainer, less artful style, with more simple declarative sentences, less playful embedding of subordinate clauses, and a vocabulary increasingly resistent to loan words from Romance languages, though Latin continued to contribute new words.  That's Modern English.

• The Nineteenth Century/Victorian Era--

• The Twentieth Century/Modernism and Post-Modernism--

Note:   This chronological list also includes web pages designed for women writers whose works are taught in English 211, the first half of the British literature survey required of English majors and minors.  I invite English 222 students to visit those pages and the others attached to the 211 web site.  It also provides commentary on male authors who are contemporaries of some of the the women writers we are reading.  English 211 begins with the Old English period and ends around 1700.

MIDDLE ENGLISH

JULIAN OF NORWICH (1342-ca. 1416)   English 222

• Showings (c. 1387-1416?: she had her visions at the age of 30 and began writing roughly 15 years later)

MARGERY KEMPE (ca. 1373-1438)  English 222

• The Book of Margery Kempe (probably written in the 1430s but never "published" in its entirety until its discovery in 1934 by Hope Emily Allen).

Early Modern English: The Fifteenth Century, Elizabethan, and Stuart Periods (1400-1603)

MARY (SIDNEY) HERBERT, COUNTESS OF PEMBROKE (1562-1621)  [English 211]

• "A Dialogue between two shepherds, Thenot and Piers" (written for a cancelled royal visit to Wilton in 1599)

AEMILIA LANYER (1569-1645)  [English 211]

• Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum: excerpt, "Eve's Apology in Defense of Women" (published by Lanyer, 1611)

LADY MARY WROTH (1587?-1651?)     English 222

• The Countess of Montgomery's Urania (published by Wroth in 1621)

Modern English: Parliamentary/Puritan Revolution (1642-9); Protectorate and Commonwealth (1649-66); Restoration (1666-88); "Bloodless" Revolution and Early Eighteenth-Century (1688-1700)

LADY ANNE HALKETT (1622-1699)  [English 211]

• Memoirs (probably written in the late 1670s; published 1875)

DOROTHY OSBORNE (1627-1695)  [English 211]

• Letters (written in the 1650s, discovered in 1888, first published in 1928)

APHRA BEHN (1640?-1689)  [English 211]

• Oroonoko (published by Behn in 1688)

MARY ASTELL (1666-1731)  [English 211]

• Some Reflections Upon Marriage (1700)

ANNE FINCH, COUNTESS OF WINCHILSEA (1661-1720)  English 222

• "Introduction" and "A Nocturnal Reverie" from Miscellany Poems on Several Occasions (written 1689?, Miscellany published by Finch in 1713 but without the "Introduction" which was discovered and reprinted in 1903)

LADY MARY WORTLEY MONTAGU (1689-1762)  [English 211]

• "The Lover: A Ballad" (written 1747, MS circulation until the 1970s), "Epistle from Mrs. Yonge to Her Husband" (written 1724, published 1972)

Syllabus View

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