LIT 3383 Spring 2024 - Wilson

This course uses women's roles and legal status during the reign of Britain's then-longest-reigning monarch, Queen Victoria (1837-1901) as a natal lens for contemporary American and British literatures. Students will examine works from the colonialist "mother country" alongside those published in her nascent rival superpower, the United States of America, and in Latin America. What kinds of political and literary power did women have as both nations have struggled with colonial conflict at home and abroad? What have women had to say about sociopolitical matters? As we answer these questions, we'll contemplate how anxieties about sexual purity, race, and the increasingly common diagnosis of hysteria intersect in the works of such writers as George Eliot, Mary Shelley, Maria Firmina dos Reis, Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins, Sophia Alice Callahan, Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson, Sui Sin Far, Olivia Ward Bush-Banks, Mina Loy, Marianne Moore, Gabriela Mistral, Gwendolyn Brooks, María Luisa Bombal, Maria Mazziotti Gillan, Elena Garro, Nikki Giovanni, Toni Morrison, Naomi Shihab Nye, Nellie Wong, Marilyn Chin, Janet Mock, Tiphanie Yanique, and Jesmyn Ward.