What is the relation between the "subject" of British colonialism and the nation's dominant literary culture? During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, England's colonial interests in Africa, India, the South Pacific and the West Indies, and its involvement in the slave trade, generated a wealth of writing: travel and slave narratives, official and company documents, anthropological and philosophical accounts of "race," and polemics for and against empire and the slave trade. During the same period, British literary culture was increasingly viewed as a sign of its power and prestige among nations. This course has two related aims: (1) We will read documentary and fictional accounts of British colonial rule, primarily from the mid-eighteenth- through the early-nineteenth centuries, assessing how these accounts portray and/or challenge the perspectives of British imperial power, and how they attempt to render the colonialized subject. (2) Against these narratives, we will read more canonical literature of the period, asking to what extent its formal characteristics and thematic concerns reflect or respond to the discourses of colonialism. What are the connections between the lyric "I" as it emerges in late eighteenth-century poetry and the imperial "I/eye"? Between the rural or common subjects of Romantic poetry and the subjects of colonial rule? Between the land- and sea-scapes of colonial voyage narratives and those of the loco-descriptive poem? Our texts will include travel and slave narratives (e.g., John Stedman's Narrative, of a Five Year's Expedition, Against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam, Equiano's The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, the African), debates on "race" and the slave trade (including polemics and philosophical arguments by Thomas Clarkson, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Quobha Cugoano), "novelizations" of slave revolts by John Thelwall and Maria Edgeworth, poetry and prose by Samuel Johnson, William Blake, William Wordsworth, and Coleridge, and some modern theory. Requirements: three 5- to 8-page formal essays, and frequent short writing assignments. Prerequisite: a 100-level English course, except 150. Enrollment limit: 25 (expected: about 20). (1700-1900)