Tuesday, September 5th
Read “Women and Society” (180-181) and excerpts from Blackstone (181-82), Macaulay (182-184, de Gouges (184-187), the Edgeworths (187), and More (192-93)
Mary Wollstonecraft, from A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (Introduction and Chapter 2 )
Mary Robinson, from A Letter to the Women of England (134-136)
Thursday, September 7th / Slavery and its Abolition
Excerpt from William Cowper’s The Task, Book II
Read “Slavery and its Abolition” (730)
Excerpts from Newton (731-32), Cuogoano (732), Cowper (734-35), Wilberforce (735-36)
Excerpts from Nicholls, Anonymous, and Turnbull (736-740)
More Cowper from 1788: “Pity for Poor Africans” and “The Negro’s Complaint”
Thomas Clarkson, from The History of the Rise, Progress, and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade, (755-756)
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “On the Slave Trade” (748-752)
Literary Terms: rhetorical figures, heroic couplets
Trailer from Amazing Grace (2007)
A partial timeline of British Slavery and Abolition
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Tuesday, September 12th
Anna Barbauld, “Epistle to William Wilberforce, Esq. on the Rejection of the Bill for Abolishing the Slave Trade” (746-747)
Amelia Opie, “The Negro Boy’s Tale” (Please print and annotate for class; found below)
Anon, Woman of Colour (Volume 1, pp. 51-127)]
Literary Terms: epistolary novel, narrative perspective/narrator; blank verse, apostrophe, exclamatory sentences
Title page and illustrated frontispiece to the 1824 edition of “The Negro Boy’s Tale”
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Thursday, September 14th
Anon, Woman of Colour (Volume II)
Read the Introduction to the volume
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Tuesday, September 19th
Mary Prince, The History of Mary Prince (702-722), and “Mary Prince in Context,” (720-722)
Literary Terms: essay, life writing
Thursday, September 21st
Return to Cowper, Barbauld, and Opie poems
Brief discussion of Blake’s concept of “experience”
Review for First Semester Exam
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Tuesday, September 26th
No Writing Prompt due this week
First Semester Exam: Description
Thursday, September 28th
“Reading Poetry” (1225-1245)
“Poetry both represents and creates emotions in a highly condensed way” (1225)
“a poem is a discourse that is characterized by a heightened attention to language, form, and rhythm, by an expressiveness that works through figurative rather than literal modes, and by a capacity to stimulate our imagination and arouse our feelings” (1225)
How to Analyze Poetry and The Metrical Foot
Some Rhetorical Figures (added 9/28/23)
Poetry Exercises: Please print up 2 copies. Bring 1 copy in that you have completed and 1 copy that is blank. <Poetry Exercise>
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