| Lerninhalte |
American colonialism, built on territorial dispossession and plantation slavery, involved human encounters which left an extensive paper trail in American literature. We will look at two fictional and nonfictional plot forms characteristic of these transcultural interactions: the Indian captivity narrative (about white people abducted and forced to live with Native Americans) and the fugitive slave narrative (on enslaved people running for their freedom from plantation bondage). Indigenous lifeways, once experienced from beyond the severity of warfare, sometimes offered an attractive counterpoint to colonial culture (at least for a while, as in Melville’s fictionalized travelogue Typee, sometimes for a lifetime, as in Mary Jemison’s captivity story). Black fugitives, conversely, struggled to maintain their freedom, once obtained, because of the constant threat of re-enslavement; they responded to this with subterfuge and masquerade. Both types of transcultural interaction provide rich material for analyzing the complexities of cross-cultural relationships under conditions of social and psychological duress in both literary and non-literary representations.
Students are required to download a Reader (stud.IP) and purchase the following novels:
- Herman Melville (1846). Typee, or A Peep at Polynesian Life. Repr. Ed. John Bryant. Penguin, 1996. ISBN-13: 978-0140434880
- Catharine Maria Sedgwick (1827). Hope Leslie; or, Early Times in the Massachusetts. Repr. Ed. Carolyn Karcher. Penguin, 1998. ISBN-13:978-0140436761
- Martin Delany (1862). Blake, or the Huts of America. Repr. Harvard UP (ISBN-13 978-0674088726) or Mint or Beacon Press.
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