Classical and Religious Backgrounds to English Literature

English literature constantly reaches back to two wells, the Greco-Roman classical tradition and the Judeo-Christian scriptures, and this course gives you direct exposure to those source texts so allusions in later writers stop being noise and start carrying weight. You read Homer, Virgil, and Ovid alongside Genesis, the Psalms, the Gospels, and Revelation, learning to recognize the narrative modes and mythic patterns that Milton, Shakespeare, Eliot, and countless others assume their readers already know. It functions as essential background for the rest of the ELIT sequence: without it, half the imagery in the British canon reads as decoration rather than argument.