[ Wesleyan Home Page ] [ WesMaps Home Page ] [ WesMaps Archive ] [ Course Search ] [ Course Search by CID ]
Academic Year 2005/2006

The Transatlantic Eighteenth Century: City, Country, Colony
ENGL 358 FA

Transnationalism is not new. The literatures and cultures of eighteenth-century Europe and America were every bit as interconnected as global literatures and cultures today In this course we will see how European ideas of nature and culture, civilization and barbarism, urban corruption and rural innocence affected the colonial experience in America and were forever altered by it. We will look, for example, at the influence of the literary cultures of London and Paris on the young printer Benjamin Franklin and the African American poet Phillis Wheatley. We will read satires of urban life by Pope and Swift. We will see how Rousseau's ideas about rustic virtue and the noble savage fared in the New World. And we will ask how imperial culture and the transatlantic trade changed rural and urban Europe.

MAJOR READINGS

Works by men and women on both sides of the Atlantic, including Native Americans, and Africans both slave and free. We will read poetry, essays, travel writing, and fiction by Aphra Behn, Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, Benjamin Franklin, Samuel Johnson, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Tobias Smollett, among others.

ADDITIONAL REQUIREMENTS and/or COMMENTS

This course meets the English Department's pre-1800 requirement.

COURSE FORMAT: Lecture/Discussion

REGISTRATION INFORMATION

Level: UGRD    Credit: 1    Gen Ed Area Dept: HA ENGL    Grading Mode: Graded   

Prerequisites: NONE Links to Web Resources For This Course.

Last Updated on MAR-30-2006

Contact wesmaps@wesleyan.edu to submit comments or suggestions. Please include a url, course title, faculty name or other page reference in your email

Copyright Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut, 06459