British Literature and the Founding of Empire

Catalog description

This course uses literature to understand rapid shifts in making and breaking empire. Reading novels, newspapers, essays, and autobiographies, we will study liberty in colonial North America, the orientalism of British India, and adventure writing of nineteenth-century Africa. In 1773, George McCartney, a British imperial officer, looked out from India and saw a "vast empire on which the sun never sets." Ten years later the thirteen American colonies that had founded that empire were gone. We will use this sentiment to determine how empire shaped the world and to consider how it contributed to Britain's literary and cultural traditions.