| Description |
Amazons and alligators, cannibals and castaways, Utopians and men with feet for heads, Pequots and Praying Indians, canoes and tobacco: such people and objects were introduced to Europeans through fantastically plausible, (un)believable depictions in travel literature, short fiction, drama, captivity narratives, missionary and promotional tracts, engravings, and ethnographies. This course will consider the diverse meanings and uses they possess in early modern texts written and read on both sides of the Atlantic. We will also examine modern representations of these colonial encounters in fiction and film. |