HMNT 4991 Nineteenth-Century Global Travelers

4 semester hours

Exploring colonial expansion during the nineteenth century, this course examines the impact imperial endeavors had on literary and visual production. We’ll look at how encounters with other peoples and nations shaped British identity and indigenous populations within the contact zone. In addition to engaging with postcolonial theories, this course is also interested in how new technologies, such as lithography and photography, rendered distant people and worlds legible to British subjects; how guidebooks helped form the new identity of the tourist; and how women played a role within Britain’s expanding empire. During the semester, we’ll not only read and interpret novels, poems, travel writing, photography, and early films but also investigate the culture of world fairs (exhibitions that brought “exotic” spaces to the metropole), national museums, and the emergent field of ethnography. While the course will explore nineteenth-century visual cultures, its focus will be on British literature from Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” and Flora Tristan’s Peregrinations of a Pariah to Dickens’s Little Dorritt and Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado.

Junior or senior standing, or consent of instructor required.