English 710—The British Imperial Imagination: 1492-1776
Christopher Hodgkins
Fall 2012
Tuesdays 6:30-9:20 pm
Curry 331
cthodgki@uncg.edu
Office: MHRA 3316
Office Hours: TTh 10:50-11:30; T 4:50-5:30
and by appointment
Office Phone: 334-4695
Home Phone: 316-0463—before 10 pm
Required texts already on your shelf:
M. H. Abrams et al., eds., The Norton Anthology of English Literature, v. 1, 6-7th edn.
The Bible
Required text packet:
Hodgkins, English 710 Packet, found in e-Reserves on Blackboard
(Please print out each reading in advance of assigned date, read, and bring to class—I also
suggest that you use a separate folder to collect and hold these readings.)
Required texts at UNCG and Addams Bookstores:
Marvin Lunenfeld, 1492: Discovery, Invasion, Encounter (D. C. Heath)
Thomas More, Utopia (Penguin)
Richard Hakluyt, Voyages and Discoveries (Penguin)
William Shakespeare, The Tempest (Penguin)
----------, Cymbeline (Penguin)
John Milton, Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained (Signet Classics)
Aphra Behn, Oroonoko (Penguin)
Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (Penguin)
Rudyard Kipling, The Man Who Would Be King and Other Stories (Oxford)
Evelyn Waugh, A Handful of Dust (Little, Brown)
Joseph Gibaldi, The MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers, 6th edn. (MLA)
Recommended texts at UNCG and Addams Bookstores:
Bartolomé de Las Casas, A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies (Penguin)
Thomas Hariot, A Brief and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (Penguin)
Christopher Hodgkins, Reforming Empire: Protestant Colonialism and Conscience in British
Literature (Missouri)—also available as an e-Book through the library’s online catalogue
Tentative Course Schedule of Primary Readings (specific pages assigned weekly)
Week 1 (8/21) Introduction: Imperium, Empire, Imperialism, Colonialism;
Virgil, Dante, Mandeville, DeBry, Gosson, Harriot
Week 2 (8/28) Kipling, “The Man Who Would Be King”; Packet—Geoffrey of
Monmouth
Week 3 (9/4) Lunenfeld, 1492
Week 4 (9/11) Lunenfeld; More, Utopia
Week 5 (9/18) Lunenfeld; More, Utopia; Packet—DeBry
Week 6 (9/25) Lunenfeld; Hakluyt, Voyages and Discoveries; Packet—Calvin,
Hakluyt, Dee, Las Casas, Spenser; Bible—Romans 1-3
Week 7 (10/2) Lunenfeld; Hakluyt, Voyages and Discoveries; Packet—Hariot,
Fletcher (Drake), Dee, Spenser; Bible—Acts 14
Week 8 (10/9) Hakluyt, Voyages and Discoveries; Packet—DeBry, Spenser, Virgil,
Hamor, Rolfe, Donne, Purchas; Norton: Donne, Drayton
Week 9 (10/16) No Class—Fall Break
Week 10 (10/23) Shakespeare, Cymbeline; Packet—Geoffrey of Monmouth, Stowe
Prospectus for Seminar Paper: Due by Friday, October 26, 4 pm
Week 11 (10/30) Shakespeare, Cymbeline; Shakespeare, The Tempest; Packet—Strachy
(Purchas)
Week 12 (11/6) Shakespeare, The Tempest; Hakluyt, Voyages and Discoveries;
Packet—Purchas, Daniel, Herbert, Bourne, Las Casas; Milton, Paradise Lost and
Paradise Regained; Norton: Marvell
Week 13 (11/13) Behn, Oroonoko; Packet--Defoe
Week 14 (11/20) Swift, Gulliver’s Travels; Packet—Swift, Johnson
Week 15 (11/27) Kipling, “The Judgment of Dungara”; Waugh, A Handful of Dust
Week 16 (12/4) Workshop Papers
Finals (12/11) Workshop Papers
Course Requirements
Attendance and Punctuality: Since this is a seminar, your careful preparation for and
active participation in discussion are supremely important. Poor attendance, frequent tardiness,
and unpreparedness will be viewed as evidence of your indifference. If you know that you’ll
need to be excused from or late for a class, please contact me in advance.
Discussion Questions: Each week, you will write out and bring to class a couple of
discussion questions, reactions, or comments to raise during our discussion of the assigned texts.
These will be brief and informal (no longer than a paragraph each), and may be written
longhand. They will be ungraded, but I will collect them and return them to you.
Oral Report: Due on your assigned report date. Once during the semester, you will
give a 10- 15-minute oral report, in support of or in addition to that week’s assigned readings.
(You will sign up for report dates and topics on August 28. See the list of suggested topics, or
see me about one of your own.) Your report should 1) briefly review important scholarship or
criticism on the topic; 2) take a tentative position of your own; and 3) be accompanied by a onepage handout photocopied for class distribution; the handout should include a simple outline of
your remarks, and a selected bibliography for further reading. I recommend that you write out
your remarks and time them, though I will not ask that you turn in the text of your remarks to
me.
You’ll want to come talk with me early in the process about thinking through your report
topic, researching it, and developing it into a worthwhile presentation.
Prospectus for Seminar Paper: Due by Friday, October 26, 4 pm. Provide me with a
1-2 page tentative summary of your seminar paper’s thesis, accompanied by an annotated
bibliography—that is, a bibliography that comments briefly on the relevance of each cited work
to your project. The bibliography should consist of at least 5 secondary sources and as many
primary sources as you think necessary.
Seminar Paper Draft: Sent as an e-mail attachment to me at cthodgki@uncg.edu by
4 pm on the Saturday before the pre-assigned Tuesday evening on which your paper will
discussed. Your Draft will then be posted on Blackboard under Course Documents for all
to open, print, and read. A complete and polished draft of your approximately 15-page research
essay will be read and discussed by our entire seminar group at an assigned date during the last
weeks of the semester. Your paper will develop an interpretive argument about one or more of
the texts discussed in the course, or about a clearly related topic, and will incorporate primary
and secondary materials that you’ve discovered in your library research—perhaps (but not
necessarily) as an outgrowth of your oral report. By “primary sources” I mean literary or other
textual sources that originated in the period(s) under study; by “secondary sources” I mean any
critical, scholarly, or interpretive comment on those primary sources. However, despite the
research emphasis here, the key word for this project is still essay. I am most interested in your
interpretive ideas, and you should incorporate the fruits of research only as they are relevant to
your thesis. Paper format must follow the MLA parenthetical style, using a Works Cited
bibliography, as specified in the MLA Handbook. As with your oral report, you’ll want to
come talk with me early in the process about choosing a topic, researching it, and focusing your
topic to a thesis. Again, the oral report may serve as a good warm-up for you.
Seminar Paper Draft Response: Due when a “respondee’s” seminar paper draft is
discussed. I will assign each of you to give a detailed, constructive 5-minute opening oral
response to a paper draft by one of your colleagues. You will accompany this response with a 12-page written listing of your items of praise and suggestions for improvement—one copy for the
author, and one for me. The key words here are “detailed” and “constructive”—vague praise, or
criticism without concrete suggestions for revision, both miss the mark because both are
technically useless. What, specifically, are the draft’s strengths? How, particularly, might it be
made better? Quote and cite page numbers.
Final Seminar Paper: Due one week after you receive your seminar paper draft
back from me, and by 4 pm on December 14 at very latest. A carefully revised version of
your paper, accompanied by your seminar paper draft, incorporating what you’ve learned from
my comments as well as from your colleagues’ comments and any further reading and research.
Late Papers: This being a seminar, late papers cause trouble for us all, especially to
assigned paper respondents. Please make every effort email me the draft of your seminar paper
by the Saturday afternoon before your assigned Tuesday discussion date. However, if you know
that a difficulty is coming up and you’ll need more time, come see me well in advance.
Grading—Grades will be determined according to the following percentages:
Oral Report: 20%
Seminar Paper Prospectus: 15%
Seminar Paper Draft Response: 10%
Seminar Paper Draft and Final Seminar Paper: 55%
Plus or minus considerations of attendance and overall participation.
Possible Oral Report and Seminar Paper Topics (numbered approximately by week):
3.--Columbus’s motives
--Stephen Greenblatt on Columbus
--Renaissance classicism and
The noble savage myth
The “translatio imperii” (transfer
of empire) from Rome
Imperial iconography
--The Moors, the “Reconquista,” and the
“White Legend” (la leyenda blanca) of
Spain
--Spanish imperialism compared to
Roman imperialism
Islamic imperialism
Aztec imperialism
Inca imperialism
--Arawak religion
--Aztec religion
--Inca religion
4-5.--Sir Thomas More’s Utopia
and America
and anti-imperialism
and socialism
and Christian Humanism
and classicism
and the utopian tradition
as social satire
5.--Cortés’s conquest of Mexico
--Pizarro’s Conquest of Peru
--Gender and conquest
--Justifications of empire
--Las Casas
as Christian Humanist
as human rights activist
as propagandist
--Building Spain’s “Black Legend” (la
leyenda negra)
--Edmund Spenser
and the Reformation
and ancient Britain
and Ireland
and empire-building
6.--Reformation and empire
--Using Spain’s “Black Legend”
--Bible and imperialism/anti-imperialism
--Richard Helgerson on nation-building
--Theodore DeBry
as Protestant anti-Spaniard
as engraver
as proto-/anti-imperialist
--Richard Hakluyt
as preacher
as spy
as archivist/editor
as imperial propagandist
--John Dee
as alchemist
as astrologer
as archivist
as imperial propagandist
as Merlin
8.--Ralegh in virgin Guiana
--John Donne
on gender and geography
and missionary imperialism
--Michael Drayton
the “Virginian Ode”
Poly-Olbion and ancient Britain
--Jamestown
as business enterprise
as military enterprise
as missionary enterprise
--Pocahontas
as nubile savage/Virgilian virgin
as royalty
as Christian convert
as “mother of us all”
7.--Myth of the imperial martyr
Sir Humphrey Gilbert & the
Squirrel
Sir Richard Grenville & the
Revenge
--The “White Legend” of Sir Francis
Drake
--Circumnavigations compared
Ferdinand Magellan
Francis Drake
--Sir Walter Ralegh’s Lost Colony
and later myth
and Virginia (Jamestown)
and Virginia Dare
--Thomas Hariot
as scientist
as anthropologist
as colonial propagandist
--The Armada Year--1588
10.--Empire on the Tudor-Stuart stage
Marlowe’s Tamburlaine
Shakespeare’s Roman Plays
Eastward Hoe & Westward Hoe
--Shakespeare’s Cymbeline
as tragicomedy/romance
and its sources
and Othello
and King Lear
and Roman Britain
and the birth of Christ
and the noble savage myth
11.--Shakespeare’s The Tempest
as tragicomedy/romance
and the noble savage myth
and Bermuda/Jamestown
and the Mediterranean
and Francis Drake
and John Dee
and Black Legend
and Cultural Materialism
12.--Samuel Purchas
and the Hakluyt tradition
as archivist/editor
as preacher
and missionary imperialism
and pilgrimage
--Samuel Daniel, George Herbert, and
the westward course of empire
--The Puritan “errand into the
wilderness”
--Winthrop Jordan on colonial racism
--Andrew Marvell
on “Bermudas”
on Oliver Cromwell
vs. Edmund Waller on Bermuda
--John Milton’s Paradise Lost
and Spain’s Black Legend
and the noble savage myth
and empire-building
according to David Quint
according to J. Martin Evans
--Paradise Regained
and Jesus as anti-imperialist
--Sir Francis Drake’s revived reputation
13.—Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko
and racial differentiation
and royalism
and novelistic form
and gender
and the abolitionist movement
and the Dutch “black legend”
and Ralegh’s Guiana/Orinoco
and Shakespeare’s Othello
Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe
and Alexander Selkirk
and technological colonialism
as exploration narrative
as conversion narrative
and religion
and the noble savage myth
according to J. Paul Hunter
and Martin Green
14.--Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels
and Christian Humanism
and Ireland
and utopianism
as exploration narrative
as conversion narrative
as social satire
and the noble savage myth
and Tory anti-imperialism
and Swift’s insanity
--Samuel Johnson
and Tory anti-imperialism
and the American Revolution
and abolitionism
15. Rudyard Kipling’s “Judgment of
Dungara”
and evangelical missions
and the North Indian frontier
and imperial administration
--Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust
as Christian Humanist satire
and Protestant imperialism
as exploration narrative
and Ralegh’s El Dorado
and Arthurianism
and the noble savage myth
and Charles Dickens
and Joseph Conrad