123212 VO Literatures in English (2011W)

Issues of race and racism in canonical texts have become of increasing interest in the scholarly community. It is both problematic and challenging to read Elizabethan, Restoration, 18th century and Victorian texts from a modern postcolonial perspective, because 16th and 17th century concepts of race differed widely from our modern understanding of the issue. The lecture will survey the development of racist ideas and their possible origin and will look at a variety of literary texts (plays, poem and fiction), from the time of Shakespeare to the end of the 19th century, in which Africans (or "moors") are described. We will investigate stereotypes of representation and the way in which writers both questioned and reinforced such clichés and participated in their culture's discourse about race and the '"other".