I've taught many pieces of this slice of the lit in any number of classes before--I'm doing the English Lit I survey now, Beowulf to end of 18th Century, a quick 1200 years in 8 weeks, and I teach Shakespeare about every March. But "17th C" isn't a standard division in the way lit is subdivided in most programs/grad schools. It's usually separated into Renaissance/Shakespeare, a visit with Milton, and perhaps Restoration Drama. Over across the water, there's just that obligatory dash through Colonial lit, which most teachers really do eclipse as much as possible.
I'm going to open a different window. I'll use John Donne, major early poet, sometimes an Anglican priest, sometimes a wild seducer, then get to spend some time with the very puritan Milton and Paradise Lost, and then edge toward the end of the century with Aphra Behn, one of the first women to support herself with dramatic writing, and gender-bending in a number of ways--esp. of note, her play Orinookoo, which tells the story of a slave romance set in South America (where she had traveled). All standard enough, and folks usually surveyed in the standard look at the empire of British lit. [A curious note--Brian Harley mentions that Donne is credited in the OED with perhaps the first use of the term 'western hemisphere'.]
I want to pair this with what is usually taught in a whole separate realm--the Americans of that same time frame, the British of the far margins. The key figures would be the poet Anne Bradstreet, the first woman published from the colonies, a Puritan, and a strange mirror to her contemporary John Donne. Later in the century, there are the journals of Samuel Sewall, a repentent Salem witchcraft judge.
The other threads--we will talk about the neo-classical age in France (Moliere, etc), and the Golden Age of Spain (Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Pedro Calderon de la Barca), but I don't think we'll have time to read any in depth. I do want to add two other readings. I much like the biography, Pirate of an Exquisite Mind, which examines the life of William Dampier [and would be fun to write a review of]. He is rather a pirate, but kept journals of his three circuits round the world, journals that provided the character Defoe based Robinson Crusoe on, that Capt. Cook took with him to help navigate (Dampier was the first Englishman to land in Australia...), that Darwin took along to compare notes on species (Dampier perhaps coined the term sub-species, and added a good 1000 exotic words to the English language)--journals that became best-sellers and much established travel writing. Farther afield, I plan to add Basho's Narrow Road to the Interior, the apex of his Zen/haiku poetics--exactly Milton's contemporary, and equally as influential in their national literatures.
[Dampier took very accurate notes on wind and currents and coastlines, partly commissioned by the Royal Society, partly motivated by commercial/colonial rivalry with Spain and Portugal. Isn't there some 70,000 page History of Cartography out there somewhere? I wonder how much Dampier shows up.]
The point? In lit studies we tend to isolate small bits and respond to individual achievement, forgetting so much of tradition and linkages. In fast survey classes, we follow out one slim thread. I'm hoping to open out the tapestry, looking less at time than trace out a geographic dimension, just as the world began to be aware of its parts.
bob
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