Lit in the Time of Empire

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

The British Empire was the dominant world power for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In this course we will study six English-language writers of diverse national and geographical backgrounds whose texts show a distinct awareness of the Empire as a political and cultural force. Beginning with a brief consideration of the literary representation of empire in previous eras, we will turn our attention to the prose and poetry of Alfred Tennyson (born in England), Joseph Conrad (born in Ukraine), Rudyard Kipling (born in India), W.B. Yeats (born in Ireland), T.S. Eliot (born in USA), and Derek Walcott (born in St. Lucia, West Indies), to see how the cultural power of England and the English language figure variously in their works.