ENGL 3440

Merchants, Whalers, Pirates, Sailors: Early American Sea-faring Literature

Course Description

Course information provided by the Courses of Study 2024-2025.

This course will look at how literature based at sea helps both shape and challenge concepts of freedom and capital. By looking at the relationship between the sea-faring economy and its relationship to American Expansion and the history of enslavement we will explore how literature based at sea provided both a reflection and an alternate reality to land-based politics. While the main focus of the course will be nineteenth-century literature, we will also be exploring maritime literature of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and its analogues in speculative fiction.

When Offered Spring.

Distribution Category (ALC-AS) (CA-AG, LA-AG)
Satisfies Requirement This course satisfies the Literatures of the Americas and post-1800 requirements for English majors.

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