Both British and American studies are currently being reshaped by new modes of inquiry that transcend or reconceptualize the histories of individual nations. These modes, which we are loosely grouping together under the term "Atlanticisms," focus instead on what Bernard Bailyn has called "the common, comparative, and interactive aspects" of the peoples and cultures of the Atlantic world--that geohistorical matrix bounded by Great Britain, Europe, Africa, North and South America, and the Caribbean. We will be studying a wide variety of works in English from the Restoration to the 19th century: a period of restless migration, both free and coerced, and of vast movements of ideas and commodities. Readings will include works by the likes of Aphra Behn, Daniel Defoe, Joseph Addison, Alexander Pope, Samuel Richardson, John Dyer, Benjamin Franklin, Adam Smith, Ottobah Cugoano, Phillis Wheatley, Olaudah Equiano, Matthew Lewis, John Gabriel Stedman, Washington Irving, Lord Byron, Charles Dickens, Fanny Kemble, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Frederick Douglass.
This proseminar is the first half of the year-long introduction to graduate literary study and part of your preparation for the proseminar exam that will be given in the Autumn of 2005. Students in this seminar will be asked to complete bi-weekly response papers, an in-class presentation, a textual history, an annotated bibliography, and an eight-page conference style paper.