76-453: Literature of Empire
Critic David Attwell once characterized a novel about empire as focused on ¿that moment of suspension when an empire imagines itself besieged and plots a final reckoning with its enemies.¿ The same might be said of late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century British literature, which was shaped by events taking place outside as well as inside of national borders. Even in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with international trade and slavery supporting the manor house and plantations abroad providing the cotton for British looms, the ¿England¿ of English literature spanned the globe. By the first half of the twentieth century, this empire had begun to collapse in upon itself, a process witnessed by writers inside Britain and its colonies. This course will investigate British literature within the international context of global imperialism. A section on gothic stories takes us into the realm of popular culture with H. Rider Haggard¿s She. We will look at the administration of empire in Rudyard Kipling¿s Kim. As a class, we will trace the torturous path into Self and Other in Joseph Conrad¿s Heart of Darkness, consider the portrayal of the Creole in Jean Rhys¿ Wide Sargasso Sea, and outline the links between colonial empire and international war rendered in Virginia Woolf¿s Mrs. Dalloway. These literary works will be read alongside postcolonial theory, including articles by Edward Said, Chinua Achebe, Anne McClintock, and Gillian Beer.
| A | MW | 12:00 pm - 01:20 pm | HBH 237 | Aguiar |