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Spring 2007

English 527
Trade, Colonialism, and Literature in the Long Eighteenth-Century 
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Professor Robert Markley
T 1:00 PM - 2:50 PM 
125 English Bldg
CRN: 32265 

This seminar will explore the complex relations among trade, colonialism and literature (fictional and non-fictional) in the second half of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.  Drawing on the work of a variety of feminist and postcolonial theorists as well as on work in economic history and historical ecology, we will read and discuss some of the major texts of the period as well as a number of narratives that traditionally have not made it into the canon.  Participants in the seminar will be encouraged to explore projects that  resonate beyond the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.   Those students who are not primarily scholars of the early modern period are more than welcome to use the seminar in ways that will further their own interests and research.   

We will devote attention to texts concerned with the Far East as well as those set in or concerned primarily with the Americas.   Some of the topics we will adrress include the literature of commerce and its effects on the literature of the period; reactions to the European the slave trade in Africa and the Americas; recent trends in postcolonial criticism; representations of the native woman as “other” in light of recent  feminist criticism; piracy and piratical literature and its influence on the development of the novel; and the limitations of British commerical and naval power in the South Seas and the Far East.   The texts include Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko and The Widow Ranter; John Dryden’s The Indian Queen, Indian Emperor, and Aureng-Zebe; Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, the little-read but extraordinarily popular (in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe; Captain Singleton; and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Turkish Letters.  Theory and secondary criticism will include works by feminist scholars (Felicity Nussbaum, Bridget Orr, Heidi Hutner; Charlotte Sussman); historians and historical ecologists (Jack Goldstone, Kenneth Pomeranz, and Frank Perlin); and postcolonial critics (Peter Hulme, Joseph Roach, Rajani Sudan, Srinivas Aravamudan, Lynn Fetsa, and Betty Joseph).