19th-Century Transatlantic Literature

Transatlantic literary studies asks us to think beyond traditional nation-centric approaches to the study of literature; rather than focus solely on “British” literature or “American” literature, as if they were separate entities, a transatlantic approach considers cultural production in the United Kingdom and the United States (and, more broadly, Europe and the Americas) in terms of intimate connections. In this lecture course, we will be criss-crossing the nineteenth-century Atlantic world in order to explore some of these transnational connections. A variety of genres will be considered (including non-fictional prose), but the predominant focus will be on the development of the novel from the Romantic era to the end of the Victorian period. We will be concentrating on four pairs of novels, most of which, but not all, were written by “British” and “American” authors: in the first semester, Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814) and Victor Hugo’s Bug-Jargal (1826; France), followed by Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) and Martin Delany’s Blake (1861); in the second semester, George Eliot’s Adam Bede (1859) and Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady (1881), followed by Machado de Assis’s Dom Casmurro (1899; Brazil) and Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo (1904). The three main goals of the course are: 1) to introduce you to the burgeoning field of nineteenth-century transatlantic studies and its boundary-crossing perspectives; 2) to enhance your understanding of the novel as a genre, in general, and as the dominant form of nineteenth-century literary expression, in particular; 3) to provide you with in-depth exposure to a select number of literary concepts that are vital to an understanding of nineteenth-century fiction (notably, gothic, melodrama, realism, and modernism), as well as to a few of the historical contexts that were central in shaping transatlantic cultural production over the course of the century (with a special focus in the first half of the course on the history of slavery and its abolition). Note: several of the classes may be conducted as seminars, depending on course enrollment.