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C & P in the Survey

Miles Grier
Queens College

I am grateful for being included in this ongoing experiment, particularly as one of the first cohort to teach The History of Constantius and Pulchera. Duncan Faherty enticed me by appealing to my research interest in early American Shakespeare adaptations, but I found that the prior readings on my syllabus produced a different—though still enjoyable–conversation.

The first two units of this undergraduate survey in American literature before 1865 were very historical in their focus. The students read only one text that we would properly call Literature—a selection of Phyllis Wheatley’s poems. Instead, they were focused on the ways that trade, war, and migrations (forced and voluntary) reconfigured geographies and group identities, setting the Atlantic rim in violent and perpetual motion. We read from Calloway’s The World Turned Upside Down, Michael Gomez’s Exchanging Our Country Marks, as well as Harriot’s Briefe and True Reporte. The second unit focused on captivity narratives, comparing those of Rowlandson, Dustin, and Marrant both to each other and to the fictionalized “Panther Captivity.” This segment immediately preceded Constantius and Pulchera, the first extended reading in fiction. Considering the onslaught of historical documents and scholarship, I could tell the students were relieved to be in territory that they associated with an English literature course.

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C & P and Transatlantic Feminism

Caroline Wigginton

Rutgers University

I’ll confess up front that I volunteered for this semester’s Just Teach One as I liked the idea of a shared pedagogical experiment. I had never heard of the selection, The Story of Constantius and Pulchera, though such distinctively named titular characters boded well for an interesting and odd read if nothing else.

My modest hopes were rewarded, and I opted to incorporate it into my upper-division historical feminist theories course for Women’s and Gender Studies majors and minors, subtitled “Transatlantic Feminisms in the Age of Revolutions.” I had already slated Susanna Rowson’s play Slaves in Algiers for a unit on Captivity, Romance, and Revolutionary Rhetoric, but there was room to include C&P. My students, all women, admitted being “consumed by the drama” of what they categorized as an early American soap opera, and, as one student put it, they appreciated how the narrative “reward[ed] [Pulchera’s] autonomy with what she wanted,” Constantius. They debated whether the resolution legitimated arranged marriage and patriarchy (since Constantius was chosen by her father, even if he later changed his mind). Would its eighteenth-century female readers see romance in obedience? Would they find an exhilarating freedom or a terrifying rootlessness in Pulchera’s shipboard adventures? Why didn’t it end with Constantius’s death and Pulchera’s continued adventures in drag? The story’s anonymity offered them a challenge in that they had to plumb the text in order to form opinions on possible feminist expressions and foreclosures rather than resort to what was often a too easy equation of female-authorship with radicalism and resistance.
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From Philadelphia to Arden and Back: Reading Shakespeare in The Story of Constantius and Pulchera

Sari Altschuler
University of South Florida

Though set in “the suburbs of the city of Philadelphia,” Constantius and Pulchera opens with our heroine, “on the terrace of an high building, forty feet from the ground…a most beautiful Lady of age sixteen…clad in a long white vest her hair of a beautiful chesnut colour hanging carelessly over her shoulders, every mark of greatness was visible in her countenance, which was overcast with a solemn gloom, and now and then, the unwilling tear unnoticed, rolled down her cheek” (4). A student put it best: “I turned the page expecting to her to shout, ‘O Romeo, Romeo! Wherefore art thou Romeo?’ Or at least ‘Wherefore art thou, Constantius?’” Pulchera essentially does. “Constantius! Constantius!” she cries after filling the night air with the frustrated sighs of “cruel fortune,” a “cruel parent,” and a “banished” lover (5).

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C & P in the Atlantic World

Hester Blum
Penn State University

I taught The History of Constantius and Pulchera to twenty-four students in an upper-level undergraduate course on the American Novel to 1900 this spring. The class is one I teach frequently, and I vacillate between approaches: should a student taking such a class expect it to cover the canonical heavyweights presumed by the topic (Uncle Tom’s Cabin, The Scarlet Letter, Last of the Mohicans); or wish to be introduced to novels they might otherwise never have heard of (The Quaker City, The Morgesons, Clotel); or discover lesser-studied works by familiar writers (Pierre, The Heroic Slave, A Modern Instance)? When I talk with students about their own preferences, they too respond variously, some glad for the chance to discuss Moby-Dick in a classroom setting, others eager to learn about books that they might never otherwise encounter. I am realizing that what works best for my own pedagogical practice, if I can presume to have one, is to put a new-to-me text in direct conversation with a reliable classroom staple, and it was on these terms that I approached The History of Constantius and Pulchera.

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Early American Literature, the Electronic Archive, and the History of the Book

Karen Weyler
University of North Carolina at Greensboro

I was familiar with Amelia before I began this teaching project, after having written about that novella in Intricate Relations (Iowa, 2004). I had not reread Amelia for a number of years, nor had I ever taught it. Amelia was a perfect fit, however, for my Fall 2012 graduate seminar, titled “Early American Literature, the Electronic Archive, and the History of the Book.” This class was comprised of twelve students, ranging from first-year master’s students to third-year Ph.D. students. Only one of the students is majoring in pre-1900 American literature, and most had minimal background in early American literature. In addition to collective weekly readings, the course required students to engage in extensive independent electronic database explorations, including, among others, the pay-for-service North American Women’s Letters and Diaries, Early American Imprints, First and Second Series, America’s Historical Newspapers, and American Periodicals. We also used a number of free databases, such as Cornell University Library’s Making of America site and Colonial Williamsburg’s Virginia Gazette site, as well as numerous state archives discovered by the students.

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Flash Mobbing the Early American Curriculum

Ezra Tawil
University of Rochester

When I heard about the Just Teach One project, and then again when I received the Amelia edition so beautifully prepared by Duncan Faherty and Ed White, my first reaction was exhilaration at the idea: all of us plotting to teach the same obscure but rich text, in coordinated simultaneity, and then documenting the event. This could be the closest I’d ever come to participating in a flash mob. My second reaction was disappointment that my Fall teaching schedule didn’t offer any obvious openings for the text. (My two early American literature classes this year, in which Amelia would fit perfectly, are slated for the Spring semester; sure, I could teach it then, but no one wants to show up for the flash mob the next day.) So my mind turned to the only Fall syllabus that seemed vaguely receptive, a seminar I would be co-teaching with Joan Rubin, my colleague in the History Department. Joanie and I had brainstormed the reading list last Spring–this is a brand new course to be the central requirement for the American Studies major going forward–but developed the syllabus in July, under the usual pressure of book-order deadlines. The result is “The Idea of ‘America,’” a course we have decided to build almost entirely around primary sources, unfolding chronologically from the Renaissance to the present, from Columbus’s 1493 letter to Luis de Santángel to Senator Obama’s 2004 address at the Democratic National Convention.

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Genre, gender, and power

Ivy Schweitzer
Dartmouth College

First, this text came at the end of the term when students were fatigued and full up with Early American texts in a course that was both a survey and introduction to the field that spanned 1490’s to 1790’s and included literature from the Indian, French, and Spanish traditions as well as English. Notably, this class’s least favorite text was Behn’s Oroonoko, which in the previous iteration of the course was the big hit. The present group had trouble with Behn’s Romantic language and orotund writing style; at times they could not even summarize the plot! So Amelia came as a welcomed reprieve to them. Not only could they get the plot, but they experienced the sentimental mode with less resistance, and they understood the political allegory almost from the beginning and really ran with it.
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Race and Captivity in the Early Atlantic World

Siân Silyn Roberts
Queens College, CUNY

First off, many thanks to Ed and Duncan for producing such an elegant and teachable edition of this novella! What follows is a broad account of our class discussion, and I’ve included the in-class exercises I gave my students at the end of this report.

This semester I included Amelia: Or, The Faithless Briton (A) for the first time in my early American literature survey, 1592-1855 (this course is required by all English majors, but if also offered as a Gen Ed course, so it attracts a variety of students from different disciplines, at different stages of their degrees). We read it alongside Charlotte Temple (CT), and both texts are included under a broader section on the syllabus entitled “Race and Captivity in the Early Atlantic World.” So I introduce my students to sentimental literature as a variation of the captivity narrative, where the cultural purity of a vulnerable female comes under assault from a force that interrupts the cohesion of the original community. Since this is a survey, my aim in this class is to introduce students to the broader principles and characteristics of representative modes of writing from the colonial, national, and antebellum periods (ethnography, captivity narrative, slave narrative, sentimental novel, sermon, gothic short story, etc.). We only spend a week on sentimentalism, since this course spans a huge period of U.S. literary production. It’s definitely a challenge cramming this enormously complex form into one short week.
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Amelia, Agency, and the Aesthetics of Mourning

James D. Lilley
SUNY Albany

In a graduate seminar I taught this semester at SUNY Albany, one of the most immediate effects of sandwiching Amelia in between James Hogg’s The Memories and Confessions of a Justified Sinner and Washington Irving’s The Sketch-Book was to emphasize the aesthetic and political versatility of modern forms of romance. While not, perhaps, an obvious choice for a syllabus entitled “The Transatlantic Gothic,” Amelia proved an interesting and important addition to our semester, especially when paired with Rowson’s Charlotte Temple.
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Reading and Writing the American City

Betsy Klimasmith
University of Massachusetts, Boston

Amelia was the first text I pitched on opening night of my new graduate seminar, “Reading and Writing the American City.” I chose it as the first text of the semester for several reasons: its brevity meant that students could easily read the text as they prepared to start the fall term; the pdf format was easy to distribute to them even before we met; and I felt it would set the class up well for our next text, Charlotte Temple. And with its amazing resonance with and inversion, nationality-wise, of Charlotte’s presentation of rural and urban spaces, Amelia seemed like the perfect text to get us talking thematically about the ways in which the city is imagined in literature of the Early Republic.
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