English 45B

Book List

Austen, J.: Persuasion; Behn, A.: Oroonoko; Blake, W.: Songs of Innocence and of Experience; Blake, W.: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell; Defoe, D.: Robinson Crusoe; Gates, H.L.: The Classic American Slave Narratives; Melville, H.: Bartleby and Benito Cereno; Rowlandson, M.: The Sovereignty and Goodness of God; Swift, J.: Gulliver's Travels; Wordsworth, W.: Lyrical Ballads

Other Readings and Media

Shorter works and supplementary texts will be made available in a course reader and/or 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...

We will read works by Mary Rowlandson, Aphra Behn, Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, Lady Mary Wortly Montague, Anne Finch, William Collins, Thomas Gray, James Macpherson, Robert Burns, Olaudah Equiano, William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Jane Austen, Walter Scott, Harriet Jacobs, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Frederick Douglass, and Herman Melville.