Nineteenth-Century Literature in the Age of Empires

Undergraduate

This course situates nineteenth-century British literature within a context of global transimperial geopolitics, a period when empires (including but not limited to the British) were competing, collaborating, and colliding with one another. While British imperialism reached its height in the long nineteenth century, it did so in constant negotiation with other imperial formations, including French, Ottoman, Chinese, Japanese, and Russian, as well as anti-colonial resistance movements across Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean. Rather than treating “Victorian literature” as a self-contained national tradition, we read it as embedded within networks of trade, migration, war, diplomacy, and translation that reshaped the modern world. Possible authors include Thomas De Quincey, Mary Shelley, Charles Dickens, John Stuart Mill, George Eliot, Wilkie Collins, Oscar Wilde, Bram Stoker, and H. G. Wells. WR , HU TTh 11:35am-12:50pm