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David Bomberg. The Mud Bath. 1914. Oil on canvas.  © Tate, London, 2018.

Joseph Nicholls (misattributed to James Basire). "Capt. Teach alias Black-Beard" [Detail]. Engraving published in  A general history... of the most famous highwaymen, murderers, street-robbers, &c. ... By Captain Charles Johnson. Olive Payne, 1736. ©John Carter Brown Library, Brown University.

John Thomas Smith. [Beggar and former seaman Joseph johnson] from Vagabondiana; or, Anecdotes of the Mendicant Wanderers through the Streets of London. 1817. Victoria and Albert Museum, London. 

Joseph Highmore. VII: Pamela in the Bedroom with Mrs Jewkes and Mr B.
1743–4. Oil on canvas. Tate, London. Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND (3.0 Unported)

J. M. W. Turner. Rain, Steam, and Speed - The Great Western Railway. 1844. Oil on canvas. The National Gallery, London. Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

ENGL 3930, Northwestern State University
Black British Writers

​The course surveys literature by Black British writers from the eighteenth century to the present in order 1) to recognize their long under-acknowledged historical, intellectual, and artistic significance and 2) to investigate the social and cultural mediation of identity, race, and nation through their perspectives. Course content confronts the difficulty of determining who might be and who might willingly identify as a "Black British writer": Britain's participation in enslavement, colonization, imperialism, deconolization, and globalization renders the cagegory unstable and even problematic. Class members collaborate to draft counter-narratives of Blackness, Britishness, and literary history over the last 205+ years through attention to Black resistance and resilience. 

​ENGL 4360, Northwestern State University
Coming of Age in the
​  Modern British Empire

​The course explores how late 19th- and early 20th-century British bildungsroman wrangle with notions of individuality and nation, beginning with Dickens’ Great Expectations and Burnett’s The Secret Garden and continuing with Marryat’s The Blood of the Vampire, Schreiner’s Story of an African Farm, and Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, among others. Scholars such as Franco Moretti, James Buzard, and Jed Esty help the class access a number of critical concerns: that the coming-of-age novel presents modernity as ostensibly granting mobility to all individuals, that the narrative form seeks to secure the stability of national Britain, and that, in so doing, it distorts itself to accommodate the stretching of subjectivity and nation resultant from British imperialism. As we move from conventions of realism and narrative unity to Modernism and approaches to representing psychological, ecological, and cultural complexity, the class also generalyl surveys the "development" of “British” novels in the period. 

ENGL 4700, Northwestern State University
Literature & Culture: Piracy

​ENGL 4700 is an excursion: sailing the seas of History & Culture in a pair of sister vessels called Language & Literature, we go in search of learned booty. According to eighteenth-century lexicographer & literary giant Samuel Johnson, an excursion is “a progression beyond fixed limits.” Indeed, spending a semester with mostly late 17th- and early 18th-century trans-Atlantic pirates runs us to and beyond the boundaries of English-speaking civilization. But, curiously, it also directs us to the center of that civilization, encouraging us to reconsider what complexity might lie at that society’s heart. Through works by Robert L. Stevenson, A. C. Doyle, Kathy Acker, Maxwell Philip, John Gay, Daniel Defoe, and Richard Hughes and with assitance of Friedrich Nietzsche and Marjorie Garber, among others, pursuit of piratical literature  reveals a series of crises regarding governance, commerce, imperialism, race, gender, sexuality, and language itself.

ENGL 5250.03, Northwestern State University
Colonialism & Black Counter-Histories
  in Eighteenth-century British Literature

   As a field, eighteenth-century British literary studies has long emphasized historicism: situating the significance of a literary work in the historical moment of its production, often drawing on archival materials to do so. However, historical records are never objective or comprehensive. Particularly problematic in this regard are the archives of slavery which authorize the dehumanization and obliteration of Black peoples. How to historicize Black and indigenous humanity using archives of colonialism which sought to deny and diminish Black and indigenous humanity?
   This course re-conceives “eighteenth-century British literature” as not only works written during the period but also twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature written about or set in the long eighteenth century. This approach enables the class to develop a more comprehensive understanding of eighteenth-century Britain and British literature, particularly regarding Black African peoples forced into British contexts by enslavement. Consistently addressing issues of race and colonialism, the course considers the ways literary knowledge affects historical understanding and the ways in which the eighteenth century is entangled with the present.

ENGL 5250.02, Northwestern State University
Intercourse: Society, Sex, & Exchange in
​  Eighteenth-Century British Literature

Most current scholars agree that the novel solidified as a genre only around the beginning of the nineteenth century. Reading so-called eighteenth-century British novels (as well as some drama and poetry), this course traces the genealogy of the novel genre as it came into being. To investigate how the novel was conceived in eighteenth-century Britain, the class focuses on the intercourse and conversation of literary works from the period-- most notably, the ways in which eighteenth-century writers interact and negotiate relations with one another’s bodies of work. The readings’ various incorporation of social, sexual, and economic exchange reveal cultural shifts central to modernity, changes importantly related to gender, authority, and epistemology.

ENGL 5300, Northwestern State University
One and Many in Nineteenth-Century
  British Literature

At the same time that nineteenth-century British culture placed increasing emphasis on individuality— one’s identity— British society became progressively dominated by systemization and interconnection which sought to effectively organize its many subjects. New networks of railways, education, commerce, and imperialism required synchronization and standardization seemingly at odds with the individualism cultivated by Romanticism among other social and political forces. Our course will explore the tensions between the one and the many through reading nineteenth-century literary and scientific writings as well as more recent theoretical and scholarly texts.

John Leech, How to make a Chatelaine a real blessing to Mothers. c. 1886. Wood engraving. The Victorian Web, courtesy of Internet Archive and the University of Toronto.

ENGL 3170, Northwestern State University
Reading & Writing in British:
  Survey of British Literature, 1800 - present

“To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life.”                                                                          
                                                       - W. Somerset Maugham, Books and You (1940)
“Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly―  they’ll go through any-thing.   You read and  you’re pierced.”
                           - Hemholtz Watson in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932)

​Why read literature? Why do authors write it? Do literary works, as Maugham suggests, provide an escape from one's self and reality? Or, does reading open the self up to others? Do readers, as Huxley’s character Hemholtz Watson indicates, allow themselves to be entered by some new reality? Do an author’s words penetrate and possibly transform who a reader is and how they understand the world? This course provides an introduction to British literature through a representative survey of prose fiction and short-form poetry from the end of the eighteenth-century to the present. These assigned readings also consistently engage the significance of reading and writing to consider what literary endeavors might entail. The course, then, both introduces British literature since 1800 and explores the stakes of reading and writing in British.