Doct. Daniela Daniele
e-mail: danadaniele@libero.it
Anno accademico 2013-14
primo semestre
40 ore
9 crediti
Letteratura anglo-americana LM
"The (not-so) Innocents Abroad": 19th-c. American
travel narratives
This class will discuss the wide number of fictional and semi-autobiographical
literary genres which reported the experience of travel and expatriation of
19th-century Americans.
Ranging from Washington Irving's Sketch
Book to Mark Twain's 1869 satire of American tourism in The
Innocents Abroad, we will study Margaret Fuller's Romantic journeys to the
Western frontier, Herman Melville's exotic dislocation of the domestic racial
fights which led to Civil War and the problematic reaction of Henry James's
heroines to European artifacts and artificial manners.
Excerpts from the travel notebooks composed by the established literary figures
above listed will be discussed in relation to relevant travel books of coeval
women writers such as Sophia Hawthorne, Julia Ward Howe, Harriet Beecher Stowe
and Louisa May Alcott.
Bibliography
Washington Irving, The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1819-20),
in History, Tales and Sketches, The
Library of America, 1983.
Margaret Fuller, Summer on the Lakes in
1843 (1844), Ward and Lock, 1861.
Herman Melville, Benito Cereno (1856), ed. Luigi
Ballerini, Venezia, Marsilio, 2012.
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Marble
Faun. A Romance of Monte Beni, Sears, 1860.
Lydia Maria Child, A Romance of the Republic (1867), ed. Dana Nelson, Kentucky U. P., 1997.
Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad, or, the New Pilgrims's
Progress, American Publishing, 1869.
Henry James, Il carteggio Aspern (1888), ed. Sergio
Perosa, Venezia, Marsilio, 1991.
----, Amato ragazzo. Lettere a Hendrik C.
Andersen. 1899-1915, ed. Rosella Mamoli Zorzi, Venezia, Marsilio, 2000.
Daniel Shealy, ed., Little Women
Abroad, Georgia U. P., 2008.
Susan Howe, The Birth-mark unsettling the wilderness in American Literary History, Wesleyan U. P., 1993.
Suggested reading
Dion Boucicault, "The Octoroon" (1859) in Early American Drama, ed. Jeffrey H. Richards, Penguin 1997, pp.
444-494.
Renée Bergland and Gary Williams, Philosophies
of Sex. Critical Essays on The Hermaphrodite, Ohio State Univ., 2012.
Mary Suzanne Schriber, Writing Home.
American Women Abroad 1830-1920, Virginia U. P., 1997.
Requirements
A final paper written in the MLA or Chicago style on a topic related to our
classwork and officially approved by the instructor. Translation students might
replace their final research paper with a translation from texts related to the
subject, and not yet available in Italian. Even this assignment should be
negotiated in advance with the instructor.
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