Revolution and the World – ENGL 85500

Private Group active 7 years, 12 months ago

The landmark publication of Cathy Davidson’s Revolution and the Word in 1986 recast the study of American literature by essentially establishing post-Revolutionary U.S. fiction as a field worthy of study. Davidson’s focus on the “coemergence of the new U.S. nation and the new literary genre of the novel” has shaped scholarship and the development of the U.S. canon ever since. This course seeks to reploy Revolution and the Word as a springboard to interrogate how the field and its attendant canon have evolved across the last three decades. Central to our considerations will be thinking about the ways in which an accumulative plurality of revolutions (the U.S., the French, and the Haitian) impacted the formation of the early Republic. As such, we will examine how this larger political geography inflected the development of the novel. Indeed, a range of recent scholarship has fruitfully unsettled the notion that novels respect national borders, or that they retrospectively fit within the contours of mythic exceptionalist geographies. Instead of reading post-Revolutionary texts as an expression of an inevitable “American” subjectivity, this course will approach early American fiction both circum-Atlantically and transhemispherically, as we consider how the trajectory of U.S. cultural history was driven by the complex circumstances of settler colonialism and the horrors of enslavement. By moving beyond our proclivity to imagine national culture as a closed system, we will consider how early “American” novels situate themselves within global networks of exchange. In so doing, we will grapple with the shifting structures of feeling that define notions of democracy, empire, and nation in the early Republic, and attempt to account for the wider range of bodies which – either permanently or temporarily or theoretically – constituted the enthnoscapes of the early Republic. We will read a broad range of texts, including works focused on North Africa, South America, the Caribbean, Spain, India, Antarctica, and the South Pacific. Possible authors include: Susanna Rowson, Charles Brockden Brown, Martha Meredith Read, Tabitha Tenney, Washingon Irving, Caroline Matilda Warren, Leonora Sansay, James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allen Poe, Royal Tyler, Hannah Craft, Olaudah Equiano, Mary Prince, Martin Delany, and Herman Melville.

Revolution and the World – ENGL 85500

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