English 10B-1 - Spring, 2017

Literatures in English II: 1700-1900

Class Information

Instructor: Johns, Alessa
CRN: 71356
Time: TR 12:10-1:30
Location: 209 Wellman

Description

This survey course probes how literature emerges from and at the same time contributes to significant socio-cultural and political change of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. We will begin with Daniel Defoe’s lively novel Roxana and move chronologically through the period, reading works by a great variety of authors including Mary Wortley Montagu, Samuel Johnson, Olaudah Equiano, Mary Wollstonecraft, Jane Austen, Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, Rudyard Kipling, and concluding with short stories by Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary Wilkins Freeman. We will consider a variety of literary genres, fictional and non-fictional, canonical and non-canonical, in poetry as well as prose. And we will explore a range of themes, including travel and exploration, colonial and imperial expansion, slavery, sentiment, poverty, reform, and war, all the while attending to socio-political and cultural contexts as well as related art forms.

Grading

Grading will be based on quizzes and in-class assignments (15%), two papers (40%), a midterm (15%), a final (15%), and attendance and participation (15%).

Texts

Persuasion, Jane Austen
Roxana, Daniel Defoe
The Interesting Narrative, Olaudah Equiano
Rasselas, Samuel Johnson
Turkish Embassy Letters, Mary Wortley Montagu
Great American Short Stories, ed. Paul Negri
Great Speeches by African Americans, ed. James Daley
A Course Reader