Shakespeare and Contemporaries - Period 4 STEM in Amsterdam Program Spring 2023 Semester - Extended - Amsterdam

The overarching question we will be exploring in this course is "How does literature relate to its historical context"? The question asks after the relationships between art and power, between text and history, between aesthetics and ideology. In this course, we will be probing this question in the context of one of the most fascinating historical time frames - the early modern period. We will engage with the literary theory of 'new historicism' to approach this question.

In the period we will be focusing on, roughly from the second half of the sixteenth century to the beginning of the 'long eighteenth century', England first encountered many of the bigger issues that the world is still grappling with today: globalization, colonization, capitalism, ecological crisis, gender trouble, urbanization, to name but a few. It was also a period of momentous religious change, civil wars, and the beheading of a monarch. We will examine how early modern literary texts relate to this historical context.

Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU Amsterdam) awards credits based on the ECTS system. Contact hours listed under a course description may vary due to the combination of lecture-based and independent work required for each course therefore, CEA's recommended credits are based on the ECTS credits assigned by VU Amsterdam. 1 ECTS equals 28 contact hours assigned by VU Amsterdam.