Our readings
begin with selections from a tremendously popular medieval book: The Travels of Sir John Mandeville.
First written in the 1350's, Mandeville's Travels remained popular for
hundreds of years afterwards. Mandeville, possibly a fictional
penname, describes voyages to both real and fantastical places.
In his journeys, he encounters magnificent cities in China and
elsewhere, cannibals, and even monsters.
Narratives like
Mandeville's were an important influence on the earliest European
explorers. One English sea captain carried a copy of the Travels along with him in the
1570's as he explored North America. Columbus and others thought
that they would find the kind of fantastical places and people that
Mandeville describes. Our course readings will pick up from
Mandeville with the wildly popular letters of Columbus, as well as those of his
contemporary Amerigo Vespucci.
In each case, we will consider how these writers, like Mandeville,
blend both fact and fiction in their descriptions of newly discovered
lands. We will also read Sir Walter Raleigh's Discovery of Guiana,
in which Raleigh searches, unsuccessfully, for the lost city of El
Dorado, the legendary city of gold.
One of
Raleigh's friends was the English poet Edmund Spenser, who worked with
Raleigh in the colonization of Ireland. While living in Ireland,
Spenser wrote the voluminous tale of knights and adventure, The Faerie Queene,
which he dedicated to Queen Elizabeth. We will read a section of
Spenser's tale in which he uses his romance to grapple with the
question of justice and whether a government can function in the
colonial climate.
From there our
course will shift to a series of plays written by William Shakespeare
and his contemporaries. In Henry V,
Shakespeare gives us the energetic and charismatic leader King
Henry. Although the play stages imperial conquest in France in a
time long before Queen Elizabeth and Shakespeare, we will think about
how the play engages with questions of empire in Shakespeare's
time. For contrast, we will read Christopher Marlowe's plays
about a renegade imperialist, Tamburlaine.
We will use these plays to explore ambivalent portrayals of the act of
empire making.
Two other
plays, Shakespeare's The Tempest, and The Island Princess
(written by two of Shakespeare's popular contemporaries), will help us
address how England viewed the new colonial and economic opportunities
in places like the Americas and the East Indies. The Tempest
stages a spectacular shipwreck that strands a group of Europeans on an
island inhabited by magical creatures and a slavish native. The
Island Princess takes place in the Moluccas, the famed spice islands
that were the target of European trading interests throughout the
period. Both plays raise important questions about gender, race,
and the morality of European colonial and economic ventures.
Our class will
then turn to a series of novels, beginning with Sir Thomas More's Utopia.
Though not technically a "novel," More's seminal narrative uses the
discovery of far away lands as an inspiration for his fictional island
of "Utopia" Raphael Hythloday, a fictional character who says he
sailed with Vespucci, claims to be the eyewitness to the society of
Utopia, reporting on its people's customs and habits.
In Oroonoko, Aphra
Behn also claims to be an eyewitness to the events that unfold in the
British colony of Surinam. We will use this sensational story
about slavery, romance, and heroism to explore transformations in the
English thinking about overseas empire.
We will then
conclude the course with the influential Robinson Crusoe,
by Daniel Defoe, and The Female American,
a novel written in response to Defoe's popular novel. Both texts
imagine how Englishmen will behave when they are no longer under the
rule of society. According to Marx, Defoe's Robinson is the
quintessential English capitalist, while the protagonist of The Female
American is a mixed-race woman who must negotiate the wilds of the New
World.
We will also
intersperse our readings with brief selections from important secondary
and theoretical work that will help us expand our critical
understanding of these texts.