ENGL4450: The Global Eighteenth Century (53131)

Diamond, David

MWF 9:10 AM

Park Hall 259

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In this course we travel to the imperial and cosmopolitan worlds of eighteenth-century literature (circa 1660 to 1800), following people, property, and ideas through the vast circuits of exchange that define global imaginaries during the period. We focus on Anglophone, or English-language, writers who are connected in one way or another to the incipient British empire: a spy, now celebrated as the first woman professional author, who fictionalizes her experience in England’s colony in Suriname; a Scottish doctor who draws material for his picaresque novel from observations during his time as a naval surgeon during the War of Jenkin’s Ear; a self-emancipated African-Briton who intersperses accounts of his childhood in present-day Ghana, his enslavement and years of military service, and an artic expedition with Christian abolitionist arguments; an Indian masseur and restaurateur who reflects ambivalently on his labors as soldier in the British East India Company’s army; an English noblewoman on a diplomatic mission to Turkey who compares European society unfavorably to Ottoman norms; a founder of modern feminism whose letters join Romantic tropes to descriptions of Scandinavian infrastructure. Such figures demonstrate the fluidity of national identity and national literary tradition, as well as the breadth of possible relations available to institutions and logics—slavery and race, commerce and religious conversion, love and war—that brought Britons into encounters (actual and fictional) with cultural “Others.” We situate our interpretations within existing scholarly conversations by reading representations of transnational crossing and cultural encounter in a wide range of verse and prose (from fiction and periodical essay to epic poem and epistolary travel narrative) alongside the work of modern literary critics.

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