A popular truism in the second half of the nineteenth-century was that the sun never set on the British Empire. This phrase encapsulated the vast amount of territories held by the British and signaled just how far reaching its Empire was. For many, the imperial and colonizing missions were a part of “The White Man’s Burden” – the belief that the British had a responsibility to “civilize” those in what they saw as “uncivilized” spaces such as India, Africa, and Australia. For others, this was an attempt to subjugate other peoples and unfairly take their land and resources. As such, the British Empire becomes a space for examining the complicated politics of the nineteenth century, and issues such as race, nationhood, liberalism, and gender. This class will explore in detail how major novelists and thinkers responded to and represented the ideologies perpetuated by the British Empire, and examine the politics of what was ultimately a project full of negative ideas about race, gender, and non-western cultures. This class is writing intensive, and assignments include reading responses for each novel, a short midterm essay, group presentations, and a final research paper.
Required Texts (available at Revolution Books):
Lady Morgan, The Missionary
Mary Prince, The History of Mary Prince
Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea
Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone
Richard Haggard, King Solomon’s Mines
Richard Marsh, The Beetle
A course pack including possible primary and secondary readings by: Edward Said, Patrick Brantlinger, Olive Schreiner, Gayatri Spivak, Rudyard Kipling, Mary Kingsley, Thomas Macaulay, John Stuart Mill, Charlotte Bronte, Uday Singh Mehta, Thomas Carlyle, Harriet Ritvo and Anne McClintock.