Colonial Fictions: Novels of Adventures, Exoticisms, and East and West
This course will examine what Empire was in the case of British India and the Dutch East Indies (today’s Indonesia) by reading English and Dutch novels together with the work of Asian writers. This will help us develop an idea of how literature was both collusive with and critical of colonialism, how different cultures wrote about their contact with each other, and how the writing of that era has shaped our modern world.
- Day:Thursday
- Times: 6:30pm - 9:30pm CST
- Dates: Starting March 27
Taught by:
About the Course
The Age of Empire has bequeathed us a wealth of literary texts, among them adventures tales, such as Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines, as well as more serious novels about colonial encounters and life in the colonies, such as E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India. At the same time, colonialism introduced the novel as a new literary genre to many literatures in Asia. This course will examine what Empire was in the case of British India and the Dutch East Indies (today’s Indonesia) by reading English and Dutch novels together with the work of Asian writers. This will help us develop an idea of how literature was both collusive with and critical of colonialism, how different cultures wrote about their contact with each other, and how the writing of that era has shaped our modern world.
This class will satisfy one of the following curriculum requirements:
- Humanities Core
- Literary Studies Elective
- Non-Western Elective
About the Professor
Sascha Ebeling
Professor Ebeling studies both modern and premodern South Asian and Southeast Asian literary traditions and cultural history, and some of the less commonly studied European literatures. He is particularly interested in entangled histories of literary practices in Europe and Asia during the nineteenth and early twentieth century, including the emergence...
Professor Ebeling studies both modern and premodern South Asian and Southeast Asian literary traditions and cultural history, and some of the less commonly studied European literatures. He is particularly interested in entangled histories of literary practices in Europe and Asia during the nineteenth and early twentieth century, including the emergence of the novel in Asia and the global history of modernist poetry.