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Courses & Schedules
English 123 - Spring, 2011
Topics in 18th C. British Literature
Class Information
Instructor:
Johns, Alessa
Time:
TR 10:30-11:50
Location:
158 Olson
Description
Travel Narratives
The eighteenth century was an age of expanding trade and exploration; it saw the heyday of the Grand Tour. This course will consider the cultural impact of travel and travel narratives, querying how the period was shaped by voyages and their accounts even as the perceptions of travelers were affected by literary and artistic representations.
Imaginary voyages and utopias, satires, picaresque stories, Bildungsromane, sentimental and oriental tales, Gothic novels, memoirs, and slave narratives drew variously on the rhetoric and images of travel and influenced British ideas about the foreign and the exotic. Questions we will consider include: To what extent did travel and travel writing serve to consolidate notions of British national identity, and to what extent did it broaden perspectives on social and political issues? How did place and imaginative geography affect the construction of gender? How were travel narratives influenced by the language of aesthetics? In what ways did the literature register, contest, or promote the coerced voyages of slaves? the scientific and imperial expeditions of explorers? the expansion of tourism to hitherto immobile social groups?
Grading
Quizzes, in-class assignments, attendance and participation, two papers, a midterm, and a final. There will be an extra-credit option.
Texts
Travel Writing 1700-1830: An Anthology
, Elizabeth Bohls and Ian Duncan, eds.
Oroonoko or, The Royal Slave: A True History
, Aphra Behn
Gulliver’s Travels
, Jonathan Swift (excerpts)
Interesting Narrative
, Olaudah Equiano
The Travels of Dean Mahomet
, Dean Mahomet (excerpts)
A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark
, Mary Wollstonecraft
Humphry Clinker
, Tobias Smollett
Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada
, Anna Jameson (excerpts)
Journals
, Captain James Cook (excerpts)
Travels in the Interior of Africa
, Mungo Park (excerpts)
