Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

Examines issues in Victorian literature and culture in a variety of genres and media from diverse geopolitical regions organized by various critical questions and approaches. Students with credit for ENGL 434 may not take this course for further credit. Writing.

COURSE DETAILS:

Unsettling Victorian Literature

The Victorian period, 1837-1901, is the offspring of the symbolic power of Queen Victoria, who transformed from “mother of the nation” to “mother of empire” in 1876, and the brut force of a fantasy of unmarked universality known as the British “imperial century.” The readings in this course challenge us to rethink the Victorian period, and the literature it produced, toward a decolonized and environmentally sustainable future. To this end, we will engage intersections of racialized, settler colonial and environmental awareness in Victorian literature, recovering the historical experience of Indigenous peoples in predominantly white settler nations that emerged during the nineteenth century, attending to processes and effects of dispossession and violence entailed in colonialism, and questioning ongoing tendencies toward disavowal or conceptual displacement of this history. Our focus will shift from metropolitan, imperial culture to Indigenous and settler perspectives. Our approach will be comparative, looking at historical relationships between nature and society across global geo-political spaces. And our method will be disruptive, upending the standard, linear cultural history by reading contemporary literature that writes back to the colonial consolidation of the Victorian period, such as Tomson Highway’s (Cree) play The Rez Sisters (1988). The first weeks of the course will engage Victorian literature and culture through a settler colonial, Indigenous, and ecocritical lens by studying a canon linked to the remote region of northern England (the English Lake District, now a national park and a UNESCO world heritage site) made famous in the nineteenth century by the nature poet William Wordsworth. This canon of literature functions within a centre/periphery, local/global geo-cultural framework that will help us identify and disrupt colonial paradigms. The remainder of the course will study literature from colonial societies by and about settlers and Indigenous peoples, including Olive Schreiner’s Story of an African Farm; selections from Anna Jameson’s Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada; Jane Johnston Schoolcraft’s (Ojibwe) poetry and oral transcriptions; Black emigrant, Mary Ann Shadd’s pamphlet, A Plea for Emigration; and E. Pauline Johnson’s (Kanien'kehá:ka) poetry and Legends of Vancouver.

Grading

Materials

MATERIALS + SUPPLIES:

Five of our books are available from Broadview Press. I recommend that you order directly from the press to get the best rate. Tomson Highway's The Rez Sisters can be ordered directly from Fifth House or through a local bookstore, such as Iron Dog or Massey Books. All other readings will be available on the Engl 434 Canvas website.

REQUIRED READING: