SoSe 13: S-Medieval English Literatures II: Dramatic texts of the Middle Ages
Elisabeth Kempf
Comments
Dramatic texts of the Middle Ages are commonly divided into three genres: The religious Mystery Plays, the Moralities, and the secular Tudor Interludes. As products of their time, these texts deal with diverse cultural, social and political issues and concerns. This seminar will give insight into the different genres that comprise Medieval Drama as well as into their development through the Middle Ages into the Early Modern Period. While reading and discussing exemplary dramatic texts of each genre, we will put the plays into their literary and social contexts and explore the genres and their differences in form and content. Next to religious matters, social and political concerns and gender issues, the development of drama, the reactions to and the disappearing of the Mystery Plays in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries will be focus of our discussions. Underlying our readings of the plays will be the performativity of the texts that we only encounter as readers today.
The seminar will be held in English. Students are expected to have acquired a copy of Greg Walker (2000) (ed.), Medieval Drama: An Anthology, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, before the semester starts.
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Regular appointments