Empire: the Black Atlantic and Colonial Romanticism

This course examines eighteenth and nineteenth-century literature in the context of Western, and especially British imperialism. Questions we will ask include: what is empire and how does it shape literature? How does the work produced in the centre of empire imagine colonial spaces, and how does writing at the peripheries speak back to empire? How can literature question, and how can it shore up imperialist ideas? How does eighteenth and nineteenth-century literature respond to the atrocities of slavery? How does it treat First Nations' sovereignty? How do the legacies and structures of empire continue today? We will read work by canonical and marginalised authors alongside theoretical work on empire by critics such as Edward Said and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Students will gain skills in postcolonial methods, learn to read empire in literature, and gain knowledge about the history of imperialism and of abolitionist and decolonial movements.