Legette, Casie
TR 9:35 AM
Fine Arts 0303
Britain, Empire, and the Global Nineteenth Century
In this course, we will investigate the ways that both people and texts circulated globally in the nineteenth century. We will pay particular attention to the British Empire and its colonies in the Caribbean. Some of our readings will focus on fictional and nonfictional representations of how different people (including white plantation owners and descendants of enslaved people), negotiated moving between Britain and the Caribbean and beyond. These texts will include The Woman of Colour, Mansfield Park, Jane Eyre, The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands, Emmanuel Appadocca, or Blighted Life: A Tale of the Boucaneers, and Wide Sargasso Sea.
We will also consider the way texts traveled across the Atlantic, especially for the purposes of education. School textbooks produced in Britain, for British students, were circulated across the empire, so that Caribbean children were educated with British schoolbooks. We will read the poetry that was used most often in British nineteenth-century textbooks, including poetry by Wordsworth, Hemans, Byron, and we will work directly with nineteenth-century textbooks and anthologies, to analyze the structures and strategies of imperial education.