Daily Life in Early Modern France
How did handwritten documents shape life in the early modern period? What can these documents tell us about the experiences of early modern people?
Literature
Victorians and the Hidden Self: Cultural Contexts for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and The Picture of Dorian Gray
How did writers and audiences in late Victorian England and America explore the idea of a hidden or double self? In what ways did representations of this self speak to changing understandings of sexuality, gender, and class?
The American Renaissance in Context
What was the literary context in which American Renaissance writers wrote and published? How did now-canonical writers respond to popular literary forms?
Literature of the American Civil War
What literature was published and read during the Civil War? How did literature help make sense of the war and the profound changes it brought to the nation?
The World of Don Quixote
How did Cervantes’ Don Quixote respond to the social conditions and literary traditions of early modern Spain?
Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn, and Race in Postbellum America
How did Twain’s Huckleberry Finn engage and challenge popular ideas about slavery and race in nineteenth-century America? Can a text be offensive and still be worth reading?
Olaudah Equiano and the Eighteenth-Century Debate over Africa and the Slave Trade
What arguments did eighteenth-century writers make about the slave trade? How are these arguments based in understandings of African civilization? How does Olaudah Equiano contribute to these debates?
Shakespeare’s Romans: Politics and Ethics in Julius Caesar and Coriolanus
What is the context for Shakespeare’s Roman plays? What were his sources? Why did classical Rome capture the interest of people in Renaissance England?
Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Utopias of the European Renaissance
What is the historical and literary context for Shakespeare’s representation of Prospero’s island and its inhabitants? How did Renaissance writers and artists portray the European exploration of the Americas? How did that exploration inspire their visions of an ideal society?
Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko: Slavery and Race in the Atlantic World
How does Behn’s novel Oroonoko compare to other representations of race, slavery, and colonialism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries?