The 18th Century: The Rise of the British Empire in Eighteenth-Century Literature

This course reads literature from the "long eighteenth century" (1660-1820) to understand the rise of the British empire as both imaginative construction and material fact. It considers texts representing the transatlantic slave trade, including by formerly enslaved people, the conquest and settlement of the Americas, Enlightenment voyages of scientific discovery in the Pacific, "Oriental" fantasies, and other sites of struggle and domination. It asks how literary form and empire are connected, how race and difference were imagined in service of this connection, and explores the troubling contradictions of Enlightenment modernity.