ENG 476: Studies in Postcolonial Literature: The Empire Writes Back

This text surveys Romantic literature's role in consolidating Britain as the centre of empire. It highlights the ways in which the expanding print market served readers eager to learn about the wider world. Elizabeth Bohls shows that while Exoticism and Orientalism help us understand colonial discourses and imperial ideologies, texts not overtly concerned with the exotic, like Wordsworth's and Austen's, also engage the historical problematic of empire.

Repositioning Shakespeare offers an original assessment of a broad range of texts and cultural events that appropriate Shakespeare. Examining these materials within the context of 'the nation' in a postcolonial era, Thomas Cartelli makes a considerable contribution to the continuing debate about the uses we make of Shakespeare.

This book shows how Renaissance writers and artists struggled to reconcile past traditions with experiences of 'discovery'. Focusing on English, Portuguese, Spanish and French colonial projects, Shankar Raman explains how encounters with new worlds and peoples irrevocably shaped both Europeans and their 'others'. There are in-depth case studies on the English plays and verse of Christopher Marlowe, John Donne and Richard Brome.

This volume provides a comprehensive introduction to postcolonial medieval studies and examines the historical connections between postcolonial studies and medieval studies. Lisa Lampert-Weissig provides new readings of medieval texts including Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival, Mandeville's Travels and Guillaume de Palerne, a romance about werewolves set in Norman Sicily. In addition, she examines Walter Scott's Ivanhoe from the perspective of postcolonial medieval studies.

This book surveys the impact of the British Empire on nineteenth-century British literature from a postcolonial perspective. It explains both pro-imperialist themes and attitudes in works by major Victorian authors, and also points of resistance to and criticisms of the Empire such as abolitionism, as well as the first stirrings of nationalism in India and elsewhere. Using nineteenth-century literary works as illustrations, it analyzes several major debates about race, Orientalism, mimicry, and subalternity.

In this volume Suvir Kaul addresses the relations between literary culture, English commercial and colonial expansion, and the making of 'Great Britain' in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He argues that literary writing played a crucial role in generating the vocabulary of British nationalism, both in inter-national terms and in attempts to realign political and cultural relations between England, Scotland, and Ireland.