Literature: Writing the Atlantic World, 1550 to the present

In this course we will look at texts produced across five hundred years of Atlantic history, written by and about enslaved people, sailors, servants, convicts, pirates, traders, and aristocrats. Starting with the early days of Britain’s colonial project in the sixteenth century, and continuing through the expansion, disintegration, and forced dismantling of European empires over the next four hundred years, we will take in the Haitian revolution in the eighteenth century, the abolition of slavery in the nineteenth, and national liberation struggles in the twentieth.

The course ends with two weeks in which we’ll look at modern poetry and prose texts which creatively explore colonial archives and canonical literature to recover alternative passages of Atlantic history. Primarily reading texts written in English (alongside a small amount of French and Spanish writing in translation), we will consider the range of genres that writers have deployed to describe, interpret, and try to shape the Atlantic world, including adventure fiction, partisan essays, sentimental poetry, heroic tragedy, and other, more experimental forms. In exploring how knowledge, goods, and people circulated in the Atlantic, we will also engage with twentieth- and twenty first-century critical writing on race and racism, slavery, capitalism, colonialism, postcolonialism, and the Black Atlantic.

Week 1. Introduction to the early Atlantic. Extracts from English, French, and Spanish reflections on early European colonialism and encounters with indigenous peoples: Bartolomé de las Casas, A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies (1542), Michel de Montaigne, ‘Of Cannibals’ (c. 1580), John Smith, The Generall Historie of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles (1624).

Week 2. The slave trade as heroic tragedy. Aphra Behn, Oroonoko (1688), together with extracts from seventeenth-century descriptions of Surinam and the West African coast, and narratives of rebellions by enslaved people in Barbados and on a slave ship.

Week 3. Convict transportation, indentured servitude, and criminality. Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders (1722), together with James Revel, The Poor Unhappy Transported Felon’s Sorrowful Account of His Fourteen Years Transportation at Virginia in America (c. 1659–80).

Week 4. Slavery, sympathy, and poetry in the eighteenth century. Prose and verse versions of the ‘Inkle and Yarico’ story by Richard Ligon, Richard Steele, Frances Seymour, and Edward Jerningham; abolitionist poetry by William Cowper and Anna Laetitia Barbauld; poems by Phillis Wheatley Peters.

Week 5. Atlantic Ocean picaresque. Tobias Smollett, The Adventures of Roderick Random (1748), together with extracts from A General History of the Pyrates (1724).

Week 6. Autobiography and abolition (I). Oloudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative (1789), together with extracts from the biography of Job Ben Solomon (1738) and Ottobah Cugoano’s Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species (1787).

Week 7. Romance, virtue, and plantation slavery. The Woman of Colour: A Tale (1808), together with excerpts from Jane Austen, Mansfield Park (1814).

Week 8. Transatlantic radicalism. William Blake, America: A Prophecy (1793), excerpts from Robert Wedderburn’s The Axe Laid to the Root (1817) and The Horrors of Slavery (1824), together with excerpts from writings by John Thelwall (1790s).

Week 9. Resistance and revolution in colonial Gothic novels. Cynric Williams, Hamel, the Obeah Man (1827), together with short extracts from William Earle, Obi; or, The History of Three-Fingered Jack (1800) and Victor Hugo, Bug-Jargal (1826).

Week 10. Autobiography and abolition (II). The History of Mary Prince (1831), together with the Narrative of Joanna; An Emancipated Slave, of Surinam (1796, 1838) and Florence Hall’s Memoir (c. 1810).

Week 11. Postcolonial interventions in the literary canon. Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), together with extracts from poems by Derek Walcott.

Follow up: Innovative poetry and prose engage the colonial archive. M. NourbeSe Philip, Zong! (2008) together with extracts from Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (2007).

By the end of the course you should be able to:

- Understand the range of positions from which people have written about the Atlantic world, the diversity of political commitments that these writers have had, and how both have changed over time.

- Understand and evaluate how writers have used a range of forms and genres to describe, interpret, and try to shape the Atlantic world, in both literary and non-literary texts.

- Make connections between the style and form of writing about the Atlantic world, the circulation of knowledge across the Atlantic, and the historical conflicts — including slavery, colonialism, forced labour, rebellion and revolution — which brought that world into being.

- Undertake further independent study of literary and non-literary writing produced in and about colonial and/or maritime situations, using methods and concepts gained in this course.