Literature

19th Century, Collection Essays

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?

Alexandra Lindgren-Gibson with Lawrence Howe
August 20, 2013

18th Century, Collection Essays

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?

Hana Layson with Valentina Tikoff
October 22, 2012

16th Century, 17th Century, 18th Century, 19th Century, Collection Essays

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?

Hana Layson with Amelia Zurcher
October 17, 2012

17th Century, 18th Century, Collection Essays

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?

Hana Layson with Amelia Zurcher
May 14, 2012

17th Century, 18th Century, 19th Century, Collection Essays

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?

Hana Layson with Kasey Evans
May 14, 2012