The Early Modern Body

Learning Outcomes

Knowledge and Understanding

Having successfully completed this module, you will be able to demonstrate knowledge and understanding of:

• the historical contexts for discourses about the body in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
• different critical approaches to the text.
• critically engage with existing criticism and scholarship about the body in the early modern period.

Subject Specific Intellectual and Research Skills

Having successfully completed this module you will be able to:

• articulate a critical argument about early modern literature and its depictions of the human body.

Transferable and Generic Skills

Having successfully completed this module you will be able to:

• demonstrate appropriate research skills.

The syllabus will include a range of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century books, essays and plays about the body. It is organised around themes and genres: each week the students will be introduced to the way a particular subject (e.g. gender or physiology) is approached from a particular generic perspective (e.g. drama, poetry, treatises). The non-fictional material will be used to ground and give context to the literary texts, but also interpreted and analysed in its own right. Specific texts for close study will be confirmed by the module convenor. Texts may include the following:

Ben Jonson, Every Man in his Humour (1598)

William Shakespeare, Macbeth (1606)

Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621)

John Donne, Meditations (no. XVII), ‘Death's Duel’ (1624)

William Harvey, On the Motion of the Heart (1628)

Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651)

John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, ‘The Imperfect Enjoyment’ (1680)

Aphra Behn, Oroonoko (1688)

Eliza Haywood, Fantomina (1725)

George Cheyne, The English Malady (1731)

Teaching methods: 1 Lecture and 1 Seminar per week. Individual essay feedback sessions.

Learning methods: independent study, group presentations.

This module includes a Learning Support Hour. This is a flexible contact hour, 5 in total, designed to support and respond to the particular cohort taking the module from year to year. This hour will include (but not be limited to) activities such as language, theory and research skills classes; group work supervisions; assignment preparation and essay writing guidance; assignment consultations; feedback and feed-forward sessions.

Summative

This is how we’ll formally assess what you have learned in this module.

Referral

This is how we’ll assess you if you don’t meet the criteria to pass this module.