English 45B

Description

   Readings in prose fiction, poetry and autobiography from the British Isles and the Atlantic world from 1688 through 1850: 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, the revolt of the North American settler colonies, and the expansion and abolition of the British slave trade. Our readings will explore the relations between home and the world in writings preoccupoed with journeys outward and inward, real and imaginary, voluntary and forced.

We’ll 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, Margaret Chalmers, Phyllis Wheatley, Olaudah Equiano, William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Jane Austen, Walter Scott, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Frederick Douglass, and Herman Melville.

Books include:

Rowlandson, The Sovereignty and Goodness of God; Behn, Oroonoko; Defoe, Robinson Crusoe; Swift, Gulliver’s Travels; Blake, Songs of Innocence and of Experience; The Marriage of Heaven and Hell; Austen, Persuasion; Gates, ed., The Classic American Slave Narratives; Melville, Bartleby and Benito Cereno. A course reader, containing selections of poetry and short fiction, will be made available.