English 259: Liberty and Slavery in American Literary History
Professor Gould
Semester II, 2000-01
Office: 205 Horace Mann (3-3736)
Hours: M/W 10-11 and W 1:30-2:30
Philip_Gould@Brown.edu
This course offers an interdisciplinary approach to the formative discourses of “liberty” and “slavery” in American literature during the historical period from the American Revolution to 1900. It pays particular attention to the development of the genre of antislavery literature. Although its focus is primarily upon American literature, it reads beyond national borders, and invites comparative readings in English antislavery literature as well. Criticism about antislavery literature generally assumes that the genre’s main concern is on the subject of chattel—or African—slavery. This course will interrogate that assumption and ask how—and why—it mediated other kinds of cultural subjects, including sexuality and gender, the nature of commerce and manners, republican politics and ideology, and the meaning of “liberty” in an emergently liberal democracy.
Baepler, ed., White Slaves, African Masters: An Anthology of American Barbary Captivity Narratives; Brown, Wieland; Chesnutt, The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line; The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself, Lowance, ed., Against Slavery: An Abolitionist Reader; Nash, Race and Revolution; Paine, Common Sense; Showalter, ed., Alternative Alcott, Wilson, Our Nig.
Requirements
Annotated Bibliography (10%)
Book Review (20%)
Class Discussion (20%)
Research Paper (50%)
Clarkson, Thomas. An Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species. (London, 1786)
Elliott, E.N. Cotton is King and Aproslavery Aruments: Comprising the Writings of Hammond, Harper, Christy, Stringfellow, Hodge, Bledsoe and Cartwright on this Important Subject (Augusta, GA., 1860).
Fitzhugh, George. Cannibals, all!; or Slaves Without Masters (Richmond, 1857).
Grayson, William. The Hireling and the Slave (Charleston,VA., 1855)
Hale, Sarah Josepha. Northwood, vols. 1-2 (Boston, 1827).
Kennedy, John Pendleton. Swallow Barn, vols. 1-2 (Philadelphia, 1832).
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth. Poems on Slavery ( Cambridge, 1842).
Olmsted, Fredrick Law. Journeys and Explorations in the Cotton Kingdom, 2 vols. (London: Sampson Low, Son and Company, 1861). (Rock)
Phillips, Wendell. The Philosophy of the Abolition Movement (New York, 1860).
Pollard, Edward A. Black Diamonds Gathered in the Darkey Homes of the South. (Pudney and Rusell, 1859). (Rock)
The Life of Josiah Henson (Boston, 1849).
Secondary Sources on Reserve (Rockefeller
Library)
Andrews, William, ed. The Oxford Frederick Douglass Reader. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.
---. To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of African American Autobiography, 1760-1865. Champagne: U of Illinois P, 1986.
Appleby, Joyce. Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical Imagination. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992.
Baker, Houston, Jr. Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984.
Barnes, Elizabeth. States of Sympathy: Seduction and Democracy in the American Novel. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997.
Ellis, Markman. The Politics of Sensibility: Race, Gender, and Commerce in the Sentimental Novel. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Ellison, Julie. Cato’s Tears and the Making of Anglo-American Emotion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.
Fliegelman, Jay. Declaring Independence: Jeferson, Natural Language, and the Culture of Performance. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993.
Gardner, Jared. Master Plots: Race and the Founding of an American Literature, 1787-1845. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998.
Hartman, Saidiya V. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.
Landry, Donna. The Muses of Resistance: Laboring-Class Women’s Poetry in Britain, 1739-1796. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
Looby, Christopher. Voicing America: Language, Literary Form, and the Origins of the United States. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.
Sale, Maggie M. The Slumbering Volcano: American Slave Ship Revolts and the Production of Rebellious Masculinity. Durham: Duke University Press, 1997.
Samuels, Shirley. Romances of the Republic: Women, the Family, and Violence in the Literature of the Early American Nation. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.
Sanchez-Eppler, Karen. Touching Liberty: Abolition, Feminism, and the Politics of the Body. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.
Shields, John, ed. The Collected Works of Phillis Wheatley. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.
Sundquist, Eric, To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature. Cambridge: Harvard University Press,1993.
Thomas, Helen. Romanticism and Slave Narratives: Transatlantic Testimonies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
Class
Schedule
January 24 Course Introduction
Gardner, Master Plots, Introduction
Ellis, Politics of Sensibility, Introduction
January 31 Political Liberty
Thomas Paine, Common Sense (1776)
Thomas Jefferson, The Declaration of Independence (in Fliegelman)
Fliegelman, Declaring Indepedence, 35-62.
Barnes, States of Sympathy,19-39.
February 7 Antislavery Literature in the Age of Revolution
Gary Nash, Race and Revolution (1990)
Appleby, “Liberalism and the American Revolution,” “The Social Origins of American Revolutionary Ideology”
February 14 Life-Writing in the Black Atlantic
The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself (1789)
Thomas, Romanticism and Slave Narratives, 226-54
Februrary 21 Cultural Enslavement in the Early American Republic
Charles Brockden Brown, Wieland; or the Transformation (1798)
Looby, Voicing America, 145-202, Samuels, Romances, 44-56
February 28 Antislavery Across National Borders
Readings from Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws (1748), and the poetry of Anna Barbauld, Philip Freneau, Hannah More, and Phillis Wheatley
*Book review due*
March 7 White Slavery
White Slaves, African Masters: An Anthology of American Barbary Captivity Narratives (1999)
March 14 No Class
March 21 Literatures of American Abolitionism
Readings from Against Slavery: An Abolitionist Reader (2000)
Hartman, Scenes of Subjection
April 4 Gender and Antislavery
Readings from Against Slavery
Frederick Douglass, The Heroic Slave (in ed. Andrews)
Sale, Slumbering Volcano, 120-45
April 11 The Other Civil War
Louisa May Alcott, Hospital Sketches, “My Contraband,” Behind a Mask, in Alternative Alcott, ed. Showalter.
April 18 The “Antislavery” Novel and the North
Harriet Wilson, Our Nig (1859)
Sanchez-Eppler, Touching Liberty, 14-49.
April 25 Reconstructing America
Charles Chesnutt, The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line (1899)
Sundquist, To Wake the Nations, 271-323
May 2 Final Section: Research Projects
*Annotated
bibliography due
*Research
paper due on May 10