English 45B

Book List

Austen, Jane: Persuasion; Behn, Aphra: Oroonoko & Other Writings ; Blake, William: Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience; Blake, William: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell; Defoe, Daniel: Robinson Crusoe; Gates, Henry Louis: Classic Slave Narratives ; Melville, Herman: Bartleby & Benito Cereno; Rowlandson, Mary: Sovereignty and Goodness of God; Swift, Jonathan: Gulliver's Travels; Wordsworth, William: Lyrical Ballads

Other Readings and Media

Poems by Alexander Pope, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Anne Finch, Mary Leapor, Jonathan Swift, William Collins, Thomas Gray, James Macpherson, Stephen Duck, Mary Collier, Robert Burns; short fiction by Walter Scott, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allen Poe: in course reader.

Description

Readings in English, Scottish, Irish, and North American prose fiction, autobiography, and poetry from 1688 through 1848: a century and a half that sees the formation of a new, multinational British state with the political incorporation of Scotland and then Ireland, the global expansion of an overseas empire, and the revolt of the North American colonies. Our readings will explore the relations between home and the world in writings preoccupied with journeys outward and back, real and imaginary -- not all of which are undertaken voluntarily.