Early Modern Outlaws: On Land and Sea

From Johnny Depp’s Captain Jack Sparrow (2003-) to Taron Egerton’s Robin Hood (2010), notions of outlawry haunt twenty-first century popular culture and recent academic debate (see Phillips (ed.) 2005 and Jowitt, 2010). A fascination with renegade figures is also found in the early modern period. Developing first and second-year work on critical and theoretical approaches to literature, the course examines representations of Robin Hood (weeks 2-5) and pirates (weeks 7-10) in a range of generically distinct sixteenth- and seventeenth-century texts.