Courses

Summer 2021: Required Courses & Non-Required/Elective Courses

Spring 2021: Required Courses & Non-Required/Elective Courses

The Rights of Man, Thomas Paine’s classic argument in defense of the individual’s right to assert freedom in the face of tyranny, was a popular late-eighteenth century refrain originating from the 1789 French Revolution. But generalized arguments about individual human rights also gave rise to specific debates concerning the rights of women and Negro slaves. What rights were these individuals denied in eighteenth-century Britain and how did the period’s literature reflect and resolve the problems of social, racial and gender inequality? This course will consider these questions as a way of introducing you to the study of race and gender in a British colonial context. But it is particularly concerned with occasions in literature where British writers combined simultaneous discourses about race and gender in ways that sometimes helped and at other times hindered the fights against tyranny that Negro slaves and female advocates fought. We will read plays, poetry, novels, short stories, travel literature, and non-fiction prose as well as recent theories about gender and racial construction in the eighteenth century to discuss representations of British men and women, and colonial Others like Negro slaves, Creoles and Jews. We will consider an assortment of issues ranging from slavery, anti-slavery, abolition, miscegenation, mimicry, ambivalence, hybridity, anti-Semitism, blackness and whiteness, to marriage, libertinism, and sexual double standards in a variety of canonical and obscure texts including Thomas Southerne, Oroonoko (1696), Edward Kimber, The History of the Life and Adventure of Mr. Anderson (1754), Unca Eliza Winkfield, The Female American (1767), Mary Hays, The Victim of Prejudice (1799),  John Fawcett, Obi, or the History of Three Fingered Jack (1800), Maria Edgeworth, “The Grateful Negro” (1801), Amelia Opie, “The Negro Boy’s Tale” (1802), Anonymous, The Woman of Colour (1808), Heinrich von Kleist, “The Betrothal in Santa Domingo” (1811), Maria Edgeworth, Harrington (1817).  Remote synchronous. Writing Intensive.  Department Approval Required.  Fulfills British 1660 to 1900 requirement.  Approved AAS elective Spring 21.  Approved WGSS elective Spring 21.

Fall 2020: Required Courses & Non-Required/Elective Courses

WGSS 491 Independent Study 3 credits, Instructor permission required, WGSS Faculty
Individually supervised course in area of women, gender, and sexuality studies not ordinarily covered in regularly listed courses. Consent of program director required.