This course gives you an overview of over a thousand years of exciting, heroic, tragic, affecting, tender, and entertaining British literature, from funny and surprising riddles preserved in Old English, to the achievements of women writers in the early modern period, to the witty and political poetry of the late eighteenth century. Students will study a range of literary genres to explore ideas about nature, love, sex, gender, loneliness, community, race, social class, science, and warfare, and how these concepts change with rapidly changing social and political circumstances. Along the way, we will examine how cultural and historical contexts shape and are shaped by intellectual developments, literary movements, and individual authors, and what legacies of these early centuries of British literature are still present in our own time and beliefs. Readings will include Old English poetry and riddles, selections from Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, two plays—the anonymous early-fifteenth-century Second Shepherds’ Play and Christopher Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus—poetry by John Donne, Lady Mary Wroth, Alexander Pope, and Phillis Wheatley, among many others, and racy novellas by Aphra Behn and Eliza Haywood. Assignments will include weekly discussion boards, exercises, a reading notebook, three online exams, and a final project. Pre-requisite: English 1000 or equivalent.