Department of English

From the time of the Columbian voyages to the end of the 19th century, over ten million enslaved people were brought from Africa to the Americas, where millions more were born into slavery. These facts have been central to the literary articulation and illumination of the human condition, even in works where slavery is not the principal topic. What does the literary imagination make of slavery? And what does slavery make of the literary imagination? Guided by these twinned questions, we will study a wide variety of works by major English-language authors who wrote in or about the Americas (North America, Latin America, and the Caribbean) during the age of slavery—authors such as John Smith, Aphra Behn, Daniel Defoe, John Gay, Benjamin Franklin, Phillis Wheatley, Olaudah Equiano, William Wordsworth, Edgar Allan Poe, Frederick Douglass, Fanny Kemble, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, and Mark Twain.