123042 PS Literary Studies / Proseminar Literature (2019S)

Early-modern literature and culture was greatly interested in tales of Amazons, all-female warrior tribes. According to the myths of classical antiquity, they were to be found in the far East, or in Africa, or the equally strange North—in any case, at the end of the world. Little wonder, then, that early-modern sailors encountered them again in the Americas, or so they claimed. At home, early-modern English society tried to make sense of its own barbarous past, in the myth of Boudica, and the challenges to patriarchal ideology posed by a confident female monarch: Queen Elizabeth I fashioned herself as virgin queen and mother-wife of her nation, and as a virago free from feminine defects but certainly not an uncivilised Amazon. In early-modern English society female agency and power were limited. The warrior queen, as a literary character, was an important site for the negotiation of gender roles, appropriated by misogynist and proto-feminist discourses alike. This course will look at representations of warrior queens in works ranging from late Elizabethan to Restoration.

This course will familiarise students with key techniques of academic research and text production. Participants will learn to critically analyse literary works, taking into account historical context and using appropriate theoretical concepts, and they will plan a research project resulting in a short final paper.