Graduate Courses in British Studies

Comparative Slavery and Abolition

Prof. Christopher Brown

This course provides an intensive investigation in to the foundational works in the comparative history of slavery and abolition. The subject is the diverse purposes to which the practice of slavery has been put, and the various conceptual strategies that scholars have employed to make sense of them. The colloquium will place particular emphasis on social, economic, institutional, and political history, and will give special attention to the rise and fall of slave systems in the Mediterranean, Africa, and the Americas.

The Idea of Culture

Prof. Jenny Davidson

Raymond Williams called it "one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language," and the term culture appears in a bewildering range of contemporary contexts (cultural studies, the culture wars, culture versus nature, the cultured classes, etc.). This class will examine the idea of culture in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain through the lens of more recent writing about the meanings of culture. One intellectual context for our investigation is the history of cultural studies in the academy; another, the new dominance in the United States of an evolutionary psychology (indebted to sociobiology) that invokes a biological human nature to account for and vindicate human difference, particularly between the sexes.

History of the English Novel I

Prof. Jenny Davidson

When people talk about the "rise" of the novel, where do they imagine it rose from and to? We will read some of eighteenth-century Britain's major canonical fictions alongside short critical selections (Watt, Barthes, Foucault) that give a vocabulary for talking about the techniques of realism; other topics for discussion include identity, sex, families, politics (in short, all the good stuff). [Readings are likely to include Defoe, Moll Flanders; Richardson, Pamela and subsequent contributions to the controversy its publication initiated by Eliza Haywood, Carlo Goldoni and others; Fielding, Shamela and Tom Jones; Sterne, Tristram Shandy; Smollett, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker; Burney, Evelina; and Austen, Persuasion (if time permits)

Victorian Genres

Prof. Sharon Marcus

This course will explore the concept of genre and provide an intensive survey of three major Victorian genres: poetry, the novel, and non-fiction prose. We will ask what distinguishes each genre, how each genre borrows from others, and what, if anything, defines "Victorian literature" as a category that cuts across generic differences. Authors will include Tennyson, R. Browning, M. Arnold, D.G. Rossetti, C. Rossetti, Hopkins, Swinburne, Hardy, Eliot, Trollope, Carlyle, Mill, Arnold, Ruskin, Pater, and Wilde.

Introduction to the Literature of Modern European History

Prof. Emma Winter

Graduate Colloquium

Modern British Narrative: Woolf, Rhys, Gender, Modernism

Prof. Sarah Cole

This course has two primary objectives: to read closely and widely within the corpus of works by Virginia Woolf and Jean Rhys, foundational feminist writers and experimental modernist stylists; and to consider broad questions of culture, history, and literary production through the gendered point of view developed in their writings. In addition to Woolf and Rhys, we will read a selection of works by other women writers of the period, including Elizabeth Bowen and Rebecca West, along with a variety of theorists, critics, and cultural historians.

The Victorian Novel in Theory

Prof. Nicholas Dames

A survey of canonical theories of the novel alongside the nineteenth-century British novels that are often recruited as either paradigms, data, or notable exceptions. The seminar will begin with early formulations arising out of Victorian physiology and literary sociology, and will take into account the contributions of Anglo-American formalisms, Marxist genre theories, psychoanalysis, structuralism, poststructuralism, identity studies, literary geography, and studies of print culture. Our first intent will be to come to terms with the recurrent concerns or interests of novel theory: the epistemology of narration; the meaning of novelistic "character"; realism; representations of subjective experience; homologies between post-Enlightenment society and novelistic form. Our second will be to evaluate how well the typical interests of novel theory fit with the Victorian version of the form. We will, implicitly, seek to understand the lacunae in novel theory's usual set of questions and answers, as a prelude to possibly developing new approaches. We will pair notable theorists alongside their Victorian proof-texts, such as: James and Lubbock on The Portrait of a Lady; Shklovsky on Conan Doyle; Brooks on Great Expectations; Moretti on Middlemarch; Armstrong on Jane Eyre. We will also read key texts by Lewes, Lukács, Auerbach, Bakhtin, Watt, Goldmann, Booth, Genette, Girard, Barthes, Brooks, Miller, McKeon, Sedgwick, Bourdieu, Price, Woloch, among others

Readings in Early American History

Prof. Evan Haefeli

Graduate Course

Projects and Practices of Colonial Rule in the Twentieth Century

Prof. Susan Pedersen

Examines how great powers sought to justify, expand, and stabilize their colonial empires in the period after the first World War. We will examine both the rhetorical frameworks through which imperial powers understood and explained their colonial efforts and the practices of international movements and institutions on colonial governance, to colonial legal systems, and economic structures, to conflicts between metropole and colony and to the ways in which colonial governments and administrators reacted to, and learned from, each other across national lines.