This MA seminar explores early modern comic genres that deliberately unsettle literary hierarchy by manipulating register, decorum and form. Burlesque generates comic incongruity between subject and style: mock-heroic writing elevates low or trivial subjects through the appropriation of high literary styles, while travesty reverses this movement, treating elevated subjects in deliberately undignified or trivialising ways. Through close engagement with early modern texts, the course examines how these forms generate satire, interrogate cultural authority, and reflect self-consciously on the social and aesthetic stakes of literary production.
- Enseignant·e: Honor Jackson