Wednesday, January 12th

Tricia Matthew, “On Teaching, but Not Loving, Jane Austen” (2017)

Marcos Gonzalez, “Recognizing the Enduring Whiteness of Jane Austen” (2019)

Louis Menand, “How to Misread Jane Austen” (2020)

Course Information Qualtrics Survey: Please fill out by Friday, January 14th (link to be activated on the 12th)

Wednesday, January 19th

David Olusoga, from Black and British: a Forgotten History (57-197)

Course Packet: Woolman (1-3), More (6-10), Slavery and its Contexts (Newton, Cugoano, Falconbridge, Cowper, Wilberforce, Turnbull, Bicknell and Day, Wollstonecraft, Barbauld, Blake, and Coleridge 51-72)

Critical Reading:

Edward Said, selections from Culture and Imperialism, including the chapter on “Jane Austen and Empire”

Marlon Ross,“The Race of/in Romanticism: Notes Towards a Critical Race Theory.” Race, Romanticism, and the Atlantic. Ed. Paul Youngquist. London: Routledge, 2013. [Available as an eBook after logging into the UGA libraries site.]

Purdue Owl’s summary of Critical Race Theory

(Incomplete) Timeline of British Slavery and Abolition

Wednesday, January 26th


Believed to be a depiction of the Haitian Revolution, circa 1818-1819

Olaudah Equiano, excerpt from Chapters One and Two of The Interesting Narrative (1789)

John Thelwall, The Daughter of Adoption (1801)
Critical Reading:
Peter J. Kitson, “John Thelwall in Saint Domingue: Race, Slavery, and Revolution in The Daughter of Adoption: A Tale of Modern Times (1801).” Romanticism: The Journal of Romantic Culture and Criticism, vol. 16, no. 2, 2010, pp. 120–138.  [link requires signing into UGA libs]

Secondary Readings on the Haitian Revolution: David Olusoga, from Black and British: a Forgotten History (199-232) / pdf here

Slavery and its Contexts: Course Packet (Earle and Robinson 73-76; 86-91)

Current Trends in Austen Criticism / First Day of Presentations, 2013-2017 / Nneoma (2013); Kelsey (2014); Johanna (2015); Brianna (2016); Sarah (2017)

Wednesday, February 2nd

From an 1896 edition of Belinda

Maria Edgeworth, Belinda (1801) and “The Grateful Negro” (Course Packet 13-22)

Presentation: Sarah Flatt

Randhawa, Beccie Puneet. “Penitent Creoles, Failed Hostesses, and the Impossibility of Home in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda.” Transnational England: Home and Abroad, 1780-1860, edited by Monika Class and Terry F. Robinson, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009, pp. 185–207. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=ip,shib&db=mzh&AN=2009641309&site=eds-live. 

Smith, Sharon. “Juba’s ‘Black Face’/Lady Delacour’s ‘Mask’: Plotting Domesticity in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda.” Eighteenth Century: Theory & Interpretation (University of Pennsylvania Press), vol. 54, no. 1, Spring 2013, pp. 71–90. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1353/ecy.2013.0002. 

From the 1824 edition published by Harvey & Darton

Wednesday, February 9th

Amelia Opie, Adeline Mowbray (1804)

Opie’s abolitionist verse: Course Packet (92-103). See also Opie’s preface to the 1824 edition of The Negro Boy’s Tale

Slavery and its Contexts: Course Packet (Wordsworth and Clarkson 76-77; Heyrick 83-86)

Contextual material from the Norton Mansfield Park: Parliamentary Debates and excerpt from Clarkson (406-410)

Presentation: Johanna Bailie
Dominique, Lyndon J. “‘What!’ cried the delighted mulatto, ‘are we going to prosecu massa?’: Adeline Mowbray’s Distinguished Complexion of Abolition”, Imoinda’s Shade: Marriage and the African Woman in Eighteenth-Century British Literature, 1759-1808. Ohio State University Press, 2012. pp. 185-222.  Chapter 5: “‘What!’ cried the delighted mulatto, ‘are we going to prosecu massa?’: Adeline Mowbray’s Distinguished Complexion of Abolition”

Wednesday, February 16th

Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey (drafted 1798/99; published 1817)

Charlotte Dacre, Zofloya (1806)

Presentation: Kelsey McQueen
Miskin, Lauren. “‘True Indian Muslin’ and the Politics of Consumption in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey.” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, vol. 15, no. 2, 2015, pp. 5–26. 

Johnston, Freya. “Effusions of Fancy.Jane Austen, Early and Late. Princeton University Press, 2021, pp. 77-100.

No Thursday Office Hours this week but I will be in the office today from 2-3

From a November 2021 adaptation performed in California

Wednesday, February 23rd

Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility (1811)

Definitions of Sense and Sensibilitysense_sensibility

Critical Reading:

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. “Crossing of Discourses: Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl.” Tendencies, Mar. 1994, pp. 107–28. 

Richardson, Rebecca. “Dramatizing Intimacy: Confessions and Free Indirect Discourse in Sense and Sensibility.” ELH: English Literary History, vol. 81, no. 1, 2014, pp. 225–44. 

Current Trends in Austen Criticism / Second Day of Presentations, 2018-2021 / Alison (2018), Cat (2019), Emily (2020), and Sammi (2021)

Homepage, January and February, March, April, and May