Race, Empire and Gothic in the Literature of the Anthropocene

Course goals

Students who successfully complete this course

• will possess a thorough understanding of how eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Anglophone literatures confronted societal, political, and environmental crises. These crises include the transformation of attitudes towards race and gender, the material and ideological ramifications of British imperial expansion, and people's changing relationship to nature.
• will have considered the gothic through various models of literary criticism and critical theory.
• will develop the ability to present original critical arguments in the form of a longer research essay that draws upon relevant historical and theoretical contexts.

Content

This course traces the intertwining of a number of discourses (the emergence of successive models of racism, the ascent of Britain to the status of global hegemon, the birth of the gothic, changing relationship to natural and urban environments) central to the culture of modernity over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Studying them in conjunction will equip students with a rich understanding of the complex responses to imperialism, racialization, gender relations and industrialization as they continue to structure the present day.
 

Additional information

This course is part of the 'Self, Others and the Literary World' specialisation.