The Canon in the Colony: How Literature Made The British Empire

Graduate / Professional

This course explores the colonial and postcolonial life of the English literary canon from the nineteenth century to the present. The “canon” wasn’t merely a cultural export that bolstered the global project of colonialism. It was just as often ignored, interrogated, and appropriated by local readers across the Anglophone world. Taking this as a starting point, this course has four main aims: (1) to examine the theoretical underpinnings of canon formation: what is the canon, and what institutional and cultural forces go into its making? (2) to interrogate the link between literature and national culture and consider the role that the canon played in propagating notions of “Englishness” in the colonial and postcolonial worlds (3) to think about how reading choices and practices invite us to rethink questions of power, dominance, and agency (4) to introduce students to ways of measuring reader responses, both qualitative and quantitative. Starting with the nineteenth century, we look at some early legislative attempts to put the canon in the service of colonialism. We move on to traces of colonial readers—both compliant and resistant—in the archive. The course then turns to English authors who have had a particularly colourful afterlife outside England. We go on to study postcolonial theories of “writing back” and the reinvention of the canon, and end with a discussion of the place of the canon in literary culture today. Our discussions are informed by a range of literary texts, theoretical essays, publishing records, colonial textbooks, book reviews, and films from across the colonial and postcolonial world. T 1:30pm-3:25pm