ENGL4450: The Global Eighteenth Century (53131)

Diamond, David

TR 12:45 PM

Park Hall 136


In this course we travel to the imperial and cosmopolitan worlds of eighteenth-century literature, following people, property, and ideas through the vast circuits of exchange that define global imaginaries during the period. We focus on Anglophone (English-speaking) writers who are connected in one way or another to the incipient British empire: for example, a Native American missionary who made a preaching tour of England and Scotland; a Scottish doctor who draws material for his picaresque novel from observations during his time as a naval surgeon during a war between European colonial powers; a self-emancipated African-Briton who intersperses Christian antislavery arguments in his accounts of his childhood in present-day Ghana, his enslavement and years of military service, and his participation in an artic expedition; an Indian masseur and restaurateur who reflects ambivalently on his labors as a 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. We also consider writings from outside the British imperium who comment on its culture and institutions, such as The Travels of Mirza Abu Taleb Khan. This course encourages students to join existing scholarly conversations by placing 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.