Gürtner, Susanne

The year 2025 marks the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth. This course will celebrate the occasion by exploring four of her novels: Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, and Persuasion. We will situate these novels in the social, political, and literary contexts of Regency England, explore central issues and themes in Austen’s writing, as well as examine her unique writing style and famous use of irony. We will also look at Jane Austen’s critical reception from the 19^th century to the present and consider her continued relevance through contemporary adaptations of her work.

This course offers students the opportunity to explore the works of William Shakespeare and the literature of the Early Modern period through the lens of performance. The course will employ a multidisciplinary approach, incorporating elements of literary studies, theatre history, and performance theory. Throughout the course, students will actively engage in reading, discussing, and performing selected plays, examining their historical context and thematic depth, and exploring performance as a means of approaching and interpreting these texts.

The first part of the course consists of three introductory sessions that will familiarise students with Early Modern theatrical and literary culture and provide an introduction to the plays we will explore further in performance later in the course. For the second part of the course, we will meet for a two-day performance workshop in which students will deepen their understanding through practical exercises, scene studies, and group performances.

The nature of kingship is a central theme of many Early Modern plays: What is the source of princely authority, and what are its limits? How should the ideal ruler behave, and what if a monarch is corrupt or incompetent? Are there circumstances under which subjects can or even should resist their ruler?
This course will offer an overview of some central concepts of Early Modern political thought, such as the “divine right of kings,” Machiavellianism, Republicanism, and Resistance Theory, as well as explore the Early Modern public stage as a space for contemporary political debate. Starting with the genre of the “history play,” particularly popular during the 1590s, we will look at central plays of the genre, such as Marlowe’s Edward II and Shakespeare’s two Tetralogies, to explore how Early Modern playwrights responded to contemporary political and cultural developments in their works. In the second half of the semester, we will turn to Shakespeare’s later engagements with the question of political legitimacy in Hamlet and The Tempest in order to investigate the changes in political climate that came with the shift from Elizabethan to Jacobean rule.
Our exploration of these texts will be supplemented by a wide array of historical sources reflecting contemporary attitudes on kingship and sovereignty, such as speeches, sermons, pamphlets, and the writings of influential humanist and political thinkers such as Machiavelli, Montaigne, and Erasmus.

In this period, global travel increased rapidly and English voyagers brought with them exotic goods, fanciful tales, and sometimes even people from foreign lands. As the theatre reflected on this influx, it became the first place of contact with unknown cultures and people for many and played an important role in shaping contemporary attitudes towards cultural and ethnic “Others”.
In this course, we will engage with a range of plays and entertainments staging encounters with other cultures as well as historical documents such as travel narratives, medical texts, and historiographies to explore the complex and sometimes contradictory interplay of contemporary ideas about religion, nation, ethnicity, and gender that contributed to the emerging concept of 'race'.

On the Early Modern stage, crossdressing was both a common theatrical practice – all roles were, after all, played by men – and a popular plot element. In this seminar, we will encounter a selection of Elizabethan and Jacobean plays featuring both female-to-male and male-to-female crossdressing and explore how these plays participated in contemporary debates about gender relations and gender identity. By looking at a range of historical documents, we will investigate the importance of clothing in constructing and reinforcing gender roles – both on and off stage. We will also explore how these plays and their emphasis on roleplaying can heighten our awareness of the performative nature of gender identity and discuss how these theatrical representations were both complicit in shaping and upholding but also capable of challenging contemporary gender ideologies.