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.