Module: ENG6112-20 Nation and Race in the Early Modern Atlantic World

Credit Value: 20

Module Tutor:  Chris Ivic

Module Tutor Contact Details:  c.ivic@bathspa.ac.uk

1. Brief description and aims of module:

Stretching from a supposedly insular Tudor England to a global Georgian Britain, this module explores a period of national self-definition, unions and plantations as well as encounters with cultures well beyond Britain’s and Ireland’s shores. This module fosters cultural and historical awareness of important critical and ethical issues--national identity, ethnicity, race and gender--that still resonate powerfully today.

The source material on this module is drawn from a rich variety of writings, including autobiography, dialogues, drama, letters, maps, novels, poetry, political pamphlets, royal proclamations and travel narratives. The texts that you will study examine the relation between identity and self, in particular the often complex and contradictory strategies of individual and collective identity formation.

This module is intended to offer you the opportunity to:

1. study a wide range of source material from the late sixteenth to the late eighteenth centuries that engage with the emergent English/British nation-state and its encounters with cultures on the outskirts of the burgeoning British Empire;

2. explore early modern ideas in relation to issues such as nationhood and nationalism, migration, civility, Orientalism, race, slavery, and gender;

3. foster a perceptive and historical awareness as well as sensitivity to cultural diversity and important ethical issues relating to differences of nation, ethnicity, race, and gender

2. Outline syllabus: 

Section 1: Englishness and Britishness

This module begins by introducing students to work on national identity and nationalism by historians, literary historians, and sociologists. This section will foreground issues such as nationhood, national identity, civility and incivility in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Two of Shakespeare’s plays will be studied within the context of national self-definition as well as discourse on the New World.

Section 2: The self and the world

Beginning with an examination of historical and modern theories of cultural difference, this section will consider Britons’ encounters with non-European peoples in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, a period that witnessed the Act of Union as well as a burgeoning British Empire.

Section 3: Narratives of Race and Voices of the Black Atlantic

This section will focus on emergent discourses of race as well as voices of black subjects who address the intersectional relationships between gender, nation, and race. Writers might include Olaudah Equiano, Ottobah Cugoano, Phillis Wheatley and Ignatius Sancho.

 3. Teaching and learning activities: 

A variety of teaching and learning activities will be used, including self-directed tasks, seminar discussion, lectures, in-class and independent engagement with online resources, and assessment tutorials.

Assessment Item 1:

• Assessment Type: CW

• Description: Essay (2000 words)

• % Weighting: 40

Assessment Item 2:

• Assessment Type: CW

• Description: Portfolio (3000 words)

• % Weighting: 60