Course details

Name: ENGL - 529

Title: BRITISH ROMANTICISM I WORDSWORTH AND COLERIDGE ROMANTICISM AND ABOLITION

Section: 01

Semester: Summer - 2024

Credits: 3

Description:
Students in this course will consider how our understanding of nineteenth-century Britain shifts when we take into account how much of the culture that gave us Shelley, Austen, and, eventually, the Brontës relied on the transatlantic slave trade. Our work will focus on Romantic-era writers who shaped, reflected, and contributed to England’s abolitionist movement. We will read anti-slavery writing by canonical poets (Blake, Coleridge, and Wordsworth); consider the rhetorical moves in Ottobah Cugoano’s Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evils of Slavery and Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative; and read novels and novel fragments that tell the story of mixed-race heroines, including The Woman of Colour, A Tale and Narrative of Joanna; An Emancipated Slave, of Surinam. We will also read a few anti-slavery poems and lectures with an eye towards thinking about how representations of people of color are shaped by generic conventions.

The abolitionist movement is one of the first political events British white women organized themselves around, so we will pay special attention to nineteenth-century women writers including Jane Austen (Sanditon), Maria Edgeworth (“The Grateful Negro”), and Amelia Opie (Adeline Mowbray). In addition to these primary texts, we will also consider the period’s material and visual culture and spend time thinking about how anti-slavery ideologies are reinterpreted in popular culture. We’ll read these primary texts in the context of Critical Race Theory, feminist literary criticism, and emergent Romanticist critical discourses that reimagine the post-colonial project.

Last updated on 2023-10-29 By Matthew Patricia (matthewp)

Schedule: Monday,Wednesday From 1:30 pm To 4:00 pm

Graduation requirements:

  • Any Literature (1e)
  • Pre-1900 (1c)
  • Ethnic Studies (3b)
  • Graduate (BA/MA)

Teaching Faculty: Matthew Patricia (matthewp)

Is course canceled: No