17th & 18th Century Devotional Lit
We will be working with a sampling of authors: The committee that created the King James Version of the Bible (1611), John Donne (1623), Sir Thomas Browne (1643) and the American: Jonathan Edwards (1741).
Remember, this is not a unit about religion or Christianity--although those have been considerable forces in the development of the West and English. This is about how great authors have dealt with and written about the complexities surrounding religion. Tensions between public and private, communal and individual, modernizers and traditionalists continue up to this day. We will be looking at how great writers have developed their arguments--with special attention to their manipulation of langauge.