Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

The study of nineteenth century North American, British, and/or Post-colonial literatures. May include some writing from North America. Breadth-Humanities.

COURSE DETAILS:

 The final stanza of Sarah Piatt’s poem, “The Palace-Burner,” opens by asking, “Would I burn palaces?” This poem, which represents a conversation between mother and son about the picture of a female revolutionary in a newspaper, expresses both admiration for and aversion to “this fierce creature of the Commune,” and, by turning this question on herself, its speaker scrutinizes her own destructive impulses.

The ambivalence of “The Palace-Burner” is born out of and responds to a prolonged period of social and political upheaval in known as “the Age of Revolution.” During the end of the eighteenth century and first half of the nineteenth century, a series of revolutions rocked Europe and the Americas, overthrowing governments that had seemed unshakeable and spurring debates about race, gender, and religion. How nineteenth-century writers conceived of their national and individual identities within this period and after, and especially how they used these conceptions to position themselves within narratives of progress, modernity, and empire, will frame the discussion for this course, which will survey fiction, non-fiction prose, and poetry from 1790 to 1900, with careful attention to the historical, political, and philosophical events, debates, and movements that surrounded them.

Grading

Materials

REQUIRED READING: