"America" (c. 1600); engraving by Jan van der Straet (British Museum).  Peter Hulme comments (in Colonial Encounters, Methuen, 1986):  "In line with existing European graphic convention the 'new' continent was often allegorized as a woman and surrounded with the paraphernalia seen as typically American: parrots, tapirs, bows and arrows, and cannibal feasts.  The sexual dimension of the encounter with Vespucci is both visually and linguistically explicit."

The Empire Writes Back:  Reading Postcolonial Literatures With and Against the Canon

Like most of my web pages, this will be under more or less perpetual construction, so you should check periodically for updates and revisions.  Here are some basic course materials:

• Course syllabus
• Reserve Reading (e-mail me if you've mislaid the username and password)

And here are selected Web resources relevant to the texts we're studying. (You may be interested in checking out some additional resources on my English 305, "Postcolonial Perspectives," page.)

Shakespeare's The Tempest

• Allen Carey-Webb.  "National and Colonial Education in Shakespeare's The Tempest." Early Modern Literary Studies 5.1 (May 1999): 3.1-39.
• Steven Marx.  "Progeny:  Prospero's Books, Genesis and The Tempest."  Renaissance Forum 1:2 (Sept. 1996).

• Aimé Césaire page (Brooke Ritz, "Postcolonial Studies," Emory U)
• Promotional page for the film Aimé Césaire: une voix pour l'histoire (California Newsreel)
• "Pour regarder le siècle en face:  Hommage à Aimé Césaire" (Le Conseil générale de la Martinique).  In French.

• Resources for the study of Heart of Darkness (Martin Irvine, Georgetown U)
• "Africa and Africans in Conrad's Heart of Darkness" (Candice Bradley, Lawrence U)
• Heart of Darkness in context:  some related contemporary texts.

1. H. Rider Haggard, She (1885) and King Solomon's Mines (1885) (Bibliomania)
2. "[Rudyard Kipling's] 'The White Man's Burden' and Its Critics" (1899) (Jim Zwick, Anti-Imperialism in the United States, 1898-1935)
3. Mark Twain's satire, King Leopold's Soliloquy: A Defense of His Congo Rule (1905) (Jim Zwick, Mark Twain's Anti-Imperialist Writings: A Guide to Online Resources)
4. Edgar Rice Burroughs, Tarzan of the Apes (1912) (Project Gutenburg)
5. Vachel Lindsay, "The Congo" (1914) (University of Toronto) (See also Project Gutenburg's edition of The Congo and Other Poems)

• "Romancing the Indian: Sentimentalizing and Demonizing in Cooper and Twain" (Adriana Rissetto, U-VA)
• PAL: Perspectives in American Literature, A Research and Reference Guide. Chapter 3: Early Nineteenth Century - Romanticism.  (Paul Reuben, CSU-Stanislaus)

• Gerald Vizenor page (Karen Strom, U-Mass)
• Mikhail Bakhtin on the "carnivalesque" and the "grotesque" (from Rabelais and His World)