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 cultural, political economic force of what is often referred to as the British “imperial century.” Against the prevailing triumphalism of imperial expansion, this course will attend closely to the ways colonialism also elicited a profound ambivalence amongst Victorians, just as settler colonialism continues to trouble the very identity of the settler scholar and student today, potentially exposing the unsettling nature of understanding and reconciling our identities. As we will discover through our readings, nineteenth-century writers were deeply concerned with the limits of nature, sometimes anticipating a settler legacy of dispossession and appropriation driven by resource exploitation, from furs to timber, from gold to oil; looking back on that legacy, Anishinaabe scholar Leanne Betasamosake Simpson simply states, “colonization is always about extraction.” 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 settler colonial and environmental awareness in Victorian literature, recovering the historical experience of Indigenous peoples in white settler nations that emerged during the nineteenth century, attending to processes and effects of dispossession and violence entailed in colonialism, and challenging ongoing tendencies toward disavowal or conceptual displacement of this history. Our focus will shift from metropolitan, imperial culture to Indigenous and settler perspectives, including a pamphlet by black emigrant writer Mary Ann Shadd. Our approach will be comparative, looking at historical relationships between nature and society across global geo-political spaces. The first half of the course will engage Victorian literature and culture through a settler colonial and environmental 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 second half 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 poetry and oral transcriptions; Mary Ann Shadd’s pamphlet, A Plea for Emigration; and Pauline Johnson’s poetry and Legends of Vancouver. The course will conclude with a contemporary text  that writes back to the colonial consolidation of the Victorian period, Tomson Highway’s play The Rez Sisters (1988).

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 MasseyBooks. All other readings will be available on the Engl 434 Canvas website.

REQUIRED READING: