Fall 2004

E 370W • Women Writing the Americas to 1800—Honors

Course Description

What did it mean to be a woman in the Americas before 1800? How were the pivotal and tumultuous eras of colonization and early national formation experienced by Native American, Anglo-American, African-American, and Latin American women? Find out by reading their own narratives, poems, essays, and novels of the seventeenth through the early nineteenth centuries. This class will survey the literary presence of women in the early Americas. Issues to be considered include the construction of gender in early America, impacts of colonialism on the construction of gender in tribal, African-American, and Anglo-American cultures, women’s roles in colonialism and early nationalism, women and religious authority, cross-dressing and transgression, and the politics of sentiment.

Grading Policy

Attendance and participation 10%
Two 5-page papers 30%
Annotated bibliography 20%
Final 10-12-page paper 40%

Texts

Native American oral traditions (Laguna Pueblo, Navajo, Iroquois)
Catalina de Erauso, Lieutenant Nun: Memoir of a Basque Transvestite in the New World
Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, Poems, Protest, and a Dream
Anne Bradstreet, The Tenth Muse
Documents from the Trial of Anne Hutchinson
Documents of the Salem Witch Trials
Captivity narratives by Mary Rowlandson, Elizabeth Hanson, Hannah Dustan, and Elizabeth Ashbridge
Phillis Wheatley, Selected Poems
Hannah Foster, The Coquette
Susanna Rowson, Charlotte Temple
Judith Sargent Murray, Essays

back