Welcome!

Welcome, everyone, to "Community and Conflict: Literature and Society from Jonson to Milton," an MA seminar at the University of Lausanne. I look forward to working with you over the next several months. You can download a full prospectus and class schedule from Moodle. This blog will be used to post discussion topics, assignment information, and other relevant items, so please bookmark it and check it regularly. In the meantime, here's a course description:

This course guides students through the poetry and prose of seventeenth-century England, a period of unbelievable political upheaval—including two revolutions, a civil war, and the public execution of a monarch—and fascinating intellectual and cultural developments, including an experiment in republicanism, the founding of the Royal Society of London (one of the first learned societies for the study of science), the rise of modern philosophy, and a massive upsurge in women’s writing. Students will become familiar with these and other historical developments as they explore a range of important writers, such as Ben Jonson, Francis Bacon, Margaret Cavendish, Andrew Marvell, and John Milton. Central to our discussions will be the way writers imagined new forms of community (religious, legal, ethnic, sexual, and intellectual) in response to the period’s many political and ideological conflicts.