British and American Views of One Another
Featured Speaker: Professor Jeanie Grant Moore
In this lecture series, we will take literary transatlantic journeys that will give us a sense of how British and American people have viewed and evaluated one another over time, as revealed in literary genres, historical documents, and artworks. We will examine the ways that American identity has been shaped and will ask the question, “How and when did we become ‘American’ and leave British identity behind?”
April 10: “O Brave New World”: Envisioning America
When an entirely new world was discovered by Columbus, stories began to emerge that tantalized Europeans with fantastical promises of unspoiled land and speculation about what might be done with this new space. Literary representations of first encounters, combined with a look at the way Queen Elizabeth was strongly encouraged by people like Sir Walter Raleigh and Dr. John Dee to establish her “God-given right” to colonize, will provide a picture of early attitudes toward the establishment of British America.
Elective reading: Sir Thomas More’s Utopia, Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Montaigne’s The Diary of John Dee.
April 24: We or They?: Colonizing America
A look at geographical areas in early America and the differing reasons why emigrants from Britain chose them, as well as the diverse groups of people who landed in America, will reveal the origin of conflicts that still exist today. A personal conflict within colonists regarding their mother country was also growing. Historians increasingly question the idea that the American character was formed in the colonial period and have instead written of a process of Anglicization in which Americans emulated and imitated the British.
Elective reading: The Diary of William Byrd II, the poems of Anne Bradstreet and Phyllis Wheatley.
May 8: “The Die is Cast”: Declaring Independence
The Declaration of Independence helped to invent the idea of America and what it meant to be an American. A case study using Benjamin Franklin and his process of “Americanization” will lead us from pre-Revolutionary times into the Revolution itself, as we look at the ways that his example and his writings also shaped the idea of American identity. We will consider the influence of the writings of Thomas Jefferson and Englishman Thomas Paine, whose book Common Sense was to the American Revolution what Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin was to the Civil War.
Elective reading: Poor Richard’s Almanac by Benjamin Franklin, Common Sense by Thomas Paine.
May 22: The Lasting Lure of the Old Country: Early Americans Abroad
The Revolution did not stem the tide of Americans visiting the Mother Country. A number of artists — Benjamin West, Gilbert Stuart, John Singleton Copley, and Charles Willson Peale — visited or moved permanently to London in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The life of a diplomat could be less comfortable, as John Adams and Thomas Jefferson would discover. This lecture will look again at the ongoing ambiguous feelings of Americans in Britain and examine the ways that literature and art played a role in their identity and consequently the identity of Americans in general.
Elective reading: The letters of John and Abigail Adams.
June 5: Traveling Victorians: Brits in America, Americans in Britain
Charles Dickens, one of the most cherished British writers in the hearts of American readers, first visited the U.S. in 1842. His adoring readers greeted him enthusiastically, but imagine their surprise and dismay at the publication of the account of his visit, American Notes, when they read a scathing attack on many aspects of American culture. Crossing the Atlantic the other way, American writers, such as Mark Twain and Nathaniel Hawthorne, gave voice to conflicted views of the Old World. An examination of transatlantic works by these writers will expose a common discourse: a reluctance to praise the other’s culture, yet a fascination with it. A very brief look at the twentieth-century movement toward what Churchill called the “special relationship” between the U.S. and Britain will round out the course.
Elective Reading: American Notes and Martin Chuzzlewit by Charles Dickens, A Yankee in King Arthur’s Court by Mark Twain. Any of the travel journals by authors listed above.
Presenter Biography
Jeanie Grant Moore received her undergraduate degree from UCLA and her
doctorate from the University of California, Riverside. Professor Emerita of English from the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh and recently retired from the English department at the University of San Diego, she has taught a wide range of classes at both institutions and published literary articles from a variety of historical periods.
She has also led students on study tours to the U.K. as well as other countries in Europe.
Coordinator: Eileen Coblens
4/10/2024 10:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Classroom 129, (In-Person and Online)
4/24/2024 10:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Classroom 129, (In-Person and Online)
5/8/2024 10:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Classroom 129, (In-Person and Online)
5/22/2024 10:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Classroom 129, (In-Person and Online)
6/5/2024 10:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Classroom 129, (In-Person and Online)
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