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ENGL-153-01 Crossing Boundaries: 18th Century Prose Fiction
Spring only
At first glance, the idea and importance of crossing boundaries is, perhaps, not immediately apparent in the eighteenth century but its presence is certainly felt in this period’s prose fiction. Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels both convey a sense of exploration and colonial expansion outside British national borders; Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda highlights Britons’ concern about racial mixing in England; Isaac Bickerstaffe’s thinly veiled transvestite, Miss Molly, appears in Love in the City, and Mary Hays’ The Victim of Prejudice tackles, as its subject, the life of a woman who oversteps contemporary mores of female respectability and conduct. These examples illustrate the fact that British writers are interested in characters that cross racial, sexual, gender and national boundaries, and their texts highlight the problems and possibilities that such acts of transgression generate. This course looks closely at an assortment of characters that transgress margins—figures such as the pirate, the mulatto heiress, the prostitute, the kept lady, the sailor, the transvestite, the female cross-dresser, and the fugitive slave as they are represented primarily, but not exclusively, in eighteenth-century prose fiction. With a focus on travel literature, drama, slave narratives, short stories, novels and marine/ maritime literature, some relatively famous, others quite obscure, we will look at occasions where these figures are either in the service of, or in opposition to, a British Imperial project that sought to restrict, enclose, and define the borders of individuality as well as space. Some of the texts that we will encounter: The Woman of Colour, Janet Schaw’s Journal of a Lady of Quality, Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative, Lucy Peacock’s “The Creole” and Samuel Jackson Pratt’s The New Cosmetic, Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders, Oroonokos by Thomas Southerne and John Hawkesworth, John Thomas Haines The Ocean of Life, Isaac Bickerstaffe’s Love in the City and Amelia Opie’s Adeline Mowbray.
Credits: 3
Prerequisites: None
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