Module Information

Week 1: 'Thus with a kiss I die'. Introducing Desire and Death: the example of Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet"
"Romeo and Juliet", Arden Shakespeare (London: Routledge, 1980);

PART ONE: LOVE POETRY

Week 2: Loving Oneself to Death: Narcissus and Narcissism
1) The Narcissus episode, from Arthur Golding's translation of "Metamorphosis" (1567).
2) from Freud's 'On Narcissism: An Introduction' (1914).

Week 3: Sadists and Masochists
from Sidney's "Astrophel and Stella" (1591) and Mary Wroth's "Pamphilia to Amphilanthus" (1621).

Week 4: 'Wretched Lovers slain': Dying for Love
Marlowe's "Hero and Leander" (1598).

Week 5: Parodying Petrarch
Nashe's "Choice of Valentines" (c. 1592) and selections from "Shakespeare's Sonnets" (1609).

Week 6: Death and the Maiden
from Book 3 of Spenser's "Faerie Queene" (1590) (cantos 4, 5, 11, and 12).

PART TWO: RELIGIOUS WRITING

Week 7: Deadly Desires: The Erotics of Martyrdom
from the first and second "Examinations of Anne Askewe lately martyred in Smythfelde" (1546/1547);
from the ordeals of Thomas Hinshaw and John Miles, from John Foxe, "Actes and Monumentes" (1563).

Week 8: `For since I am Love's martyr': Donne on Sex and Death
from Donne's Holy Sonnets
from Songs and Sonets
from Devotions upon Emergent Occasions


Week 9: 'He who dies/ Loves his death, and dyes againe': Crashaw and Catholic Devotional Poetry
from Crashaw's "Steps to the Temple" (1646).

Week 10: 'Short Pleasures' and 'long woes': Milton's "Paradise Lost"
from Milton's "Paradise Lost", Book 4 (1674)

This module explores boundaries between Renaissance love and religious poetry, examining representations of death and desire common to both. Renaissance literature is awash with poems about male sexual desire frustrated by female sexual self-restraint - a frustrated desire expressed in poetic fantasies of death and destruction. Women's bodies are metaphorically carved-up by male poets, who in turn imagine themselves torn apart by sadistic, scornful mistresses. Death and desire also govern the experience of this period's many religious martyrs. Only in death do martyrs avoid forms of spiritual, as well as sexual, violation. Later religious poets return to the masochistic metaphors of love poetry, writing fantasies of religious martyrdom expressed in the language of sexual desire.

"Desire and Death" explores a culture's fascination with, and eroticisation of, death. In Part One, the idea of narcissism (loving oneself to death) is examined in relation to examples of sadistic and masochistic expressions of desire, in Renaissance poetry influenced by the "Canzoniere" of Francesco Petrarch. Part Two investigates the Renaissance cult of martyrdom (dying for love of God), exploring the relationship between death and desire in examples of Protestant and Catholic religious poetry.

The module addresses the following questions: What were Renaissance attitudes towards desire and death, and how can we uncover them? How might these attitudes have impacted on death's representation in literature? Can we distinguish between representations of male and female death and desire? Is it significant that death and desire are themes in religious as well as love poetry? Does the occurrence of these themes in secular as well as religious writing have any implications for our understanding of literary genre?

1. To invite comparative and coherent analyses of the genres of love and religious poetry, through focus on the themes of death and desire common to both forms of writing. In so doing, to stimulate particular interest in issues surrounding Renaissance religious beliefs and practices, poetry and prose.
2. To offer a range of critical and cultural approaches to Renaissance love and religious poetry, building on theoretical skills developed in the Reading Theory/Reading Text core modules, and giving opportunity to apply broad theoretical approaches to a detailed analysis of a particular cultural moment.
3. To discuss recent critical approaches to texts by well-known Renaissance writers, and to assess the value and importance of these approaches for our appreciation and understanding of English Renaissance literature.