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Reading Assignments

During the next five weeks, we'll be reading seven novels and one play that directly or indirectly address the effects of British imperialism, both at home in England and throughout the world.

A stack of the books we'll be reading this semester

We'll begin with Ashley Jackson's The British Empire: A Very Short Introduction, which offers a clear, concise overview of British imperialism and its legacies around the world. Jackson's book provides the necessary historical and cultural contexts for the literary works we'll be reading throughout the term.

Next, we'll encounter two Victorian-era novels set in England--Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre. Although these novels address British imperialism indirectly, they nonetheless offer important insight into the imperial mindset during the nineteenth century.

Then, we'll switch from the perspective of the colonizers to the colonized and read Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea and Jamaica Kincaid's Autobiography of My Mother, both of which offer a different perspective on the events of Jane Eyre. In so doing, these novels ask us to reevaluate Jane Eyre's "happy" ending from the point-of-view of non-English, non-white characters from the West Indies.

Afterward, we'll shift our focus from the West Indies to Africa. The two novels that take place in Africa--Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart--examine British imperialism in Africa from the perspectives of the colonizer and the colonized, respectively.

Whereas most of our readings examine empire from a historical perspective, Helen Oyeyemi's novel The Icarus Girl brings us to the present day. In this novel, Oyeyemi examines how the specter of empire looms in the lives of a family living in the English suburbs.

We'll conclude with Brian Friel's Translations, a play that explores British imperial involvement in Ireland.

Required Editions

I've ordered specific editions of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Jane Eyre, Wide Sargasso Sea, and Heart of Darkness because these editions have excellent supplements, including informative footnotes. Besides, the Broadview Press editions have incredibly thorough introductions that can give you a far more extensive overview of the novel than Sparknotes could. (I highly recommend skimming the introductions to these editions.)

You may order eBook versions of any title, as long as you order the specified editions for the titles listed above. Because I've found that students who read on their phones tend to have only a superficial understanding of the required material, I'd like you to avoid reading on your phone whenever possible.

Warning: Heavy Reading Load Ahead

There's no other way to put it: the reading load for this class is heavy. How heavy? Over the next few weeks, you'll be reading 1,747 pages, and this total doesn't include any of the online resources that I've assigned.

That seems like a lot of reading (because it is), but this is an English course. There's no need to panic. You can totally do this!

I've done my best to distribute the readings evenly, but because I've divided the readings into thematically cohesive units, there will be times when the reading load is heavier or lighter than usual. (It gets particularly heavy when we're reading Jane Eyre.) The average reading assignment is a little over 60 pages.

Questions about the readings?

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