English 45B

Book List

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

Other Readings and Media

A course reader (including poems by Alexander Pope, Thomas Gray, William Collins, Robert Burns, etc.; short fiction by Walter Scott, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe) will be made available; other readings and supplementary materials will be posted on our B-course site.

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 breakaway of the North American colonies to form a new empire between the Atlantic and the Pacific. 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...