EN 4855 inquires into the relationships between British literature and the empire from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries, focusing particularly on literary texts by canonical writers such as Shakespeare, Swift, Conrad, and Forster.  We will pay close attention to the themes and forms of the literary texts themselves while also gaining a greater understanding of the colonial contexts through which these works were created and received.  By engaging with secondary sources (critical perspectives and debates on the canonical texts), our aim will be to reach deeper levels of understanding the texts and the connections they help us make to other texts and to our current world.    

Authors and texts considered in prior incarnations of this course include: 

William Shakespeare, The Tempest

Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

E.M. Forster, A Passage to India

Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart 

Selected poems of Rudyard Kipling, W.B. Yeats, and others

Selected short stories by Nadine Gordimer, George Orwell, Doris Lessing, Frank O'Connor