History of the Global Novel

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

This course is designed to provide students with a specific and global view of the diversity of literatures that arose in and after the late 18th century to address the questions of human happiness and human freedom in a world that was being transformed by the imperial encounter, vastly expanding markets, and revolutions both conceptual and actual. We will primarily concern ourselves with novels written or circulated in English beyond metropolitan English-speaking countries for the consumption of a worldwide English-speaking audience, with an emphasis on the history of empire and its aftermath as it manifests at the domestic, political, and transnational scales. We will consider such writers as E.M Forster, Muriel Spark, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Salman Rushdie, V.S. Naipaul, Anton Shammas, Devika Rege, and Isabella Hammad.