This course explores the ways that literature is grounded in the very act of reinventing—or reclaiming, or redirecting—earlier stories, themes, rhythms, grievances, and passions for the author’s own purposes. Among the poems, essays, plays and novels to be read are works by: William Shakespeare, John Milton, Charlotte Brontë, Frederick Douglass, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Oscar Wilde, Virginia Woolf, Tom Stoppard, Toni Morrison, and Colson Whitehead. The chosen texts represent a chronological spread from the early seventeenth century to the present day. This course fulfills the Core Course requirement in Literary Studies.