[Milton-L] Seventeenth-Century Brit Lit Textbooks

[butlert at mail.wsu.edu]

Another vote for the Broadview anthology, though Norton anthologies also
come in smaller, period-centered versions. I've found the latter form
useful for my 17C survey, which along with our other surveys has now
become explicitly trans-Atlantic and trans-national. For the 17th and 18th
centuries, the earliest segment of the NAAL makes a nice supplement.

As an aside, as my charge has been extended to literatures of contact and
early Puritanism on both shores, I'm curious as to how one manages to do
all of Paradise Lost plus some of Milton's poetry and prose within a
survey course without distending (if that's the right word) the course.
I've done it myself, and while I've never regretted teaching PL I've been
aware that I've left a lot of material by the wayside. Particularly when I
was at an earlier university where the notion of "coverage" was important,
such a choice could end up being problematic. My current department has
made a conscious decision to eschew a pure coverage model, in part for
this reason.


Todd Butler
Buchanan Assistant Professor
Department of English
Washington State University
(509) 335-7639
butlert at wsu.edu