ENGL 317 - Fantasies of Untamed Nature

FDR: HL
Credits: 4
Planned Offering: Spring 2012

Prerequisite: ENGL 299. We explore how untamed nature is imagined differently by writers as the landscape changes from the Anglo-Saxon settlement to the sixteenth century, then again in late 20th-century industrialized Britain. In medieval literature (lyric, folk epic, ballad, romance, fable, and satire), wild nature becomes a place of testing, a mirror of an individual’s madness and a culture’s mindless violence, a threat to safety, a haunt of unrestrained desire, and the trysting place for lovers. Modern writers of romantic fantasy (Tolkien) depict a twisted, dehumanizing industrial world which nature and those who live in harmony with it oppose and tear down. Recent writers (A. S. Byatt, Alice Thomas Ellis) resurrect medieval stories of dragons, trolls, and faerie kings to represent what wild nature really is, as opposed to what romantics and New Agers make of it: transient, parasitic, and violent, but also a refuge for humans who are suffering the loss of those they love. Reading throughout in historical geography and videos on the English landscape at different stages. Craun.