English 524: Race, Religion, and Empire 1660-1830

This course will examine how writers of the long eighteenth century represented the relationships between race and religion at a time when the primary definition of “ethnic” was “heathen” or “non-Christian.” As a largely Protestant and Anglo-Saxon Britain expanded its empire to include North America, Ireland, India, and the West Indies, British writers devised various strategies for accommodating—or eradicating—racial and religious difference. In doing so, they explored the distinctions between savage and civilized, British and foreign, human and monstrous. By placing a range of eighteenth-century texts (captivity and travel narratives, autobiography, poetry, and novels) in dialogue with recent theories of racial difference and accounts of British imperial expansion, we’ll begin to pose some answers to the following questions: Why did literary representations of race gradually place less emphasis on moral traits and more on physical traits over the course of the eighteenth century? How did religious rhetoric both promote and prevent racial assimilation? How did global exploration contribute to the development of secular understandings of race? And how did perceived racial and religious differences influence Britain’s colonial agenda?

No prior knowledge of eighteenth-century literature is required for the course. Primary readings may include: Mary Rowlandson’s Narrative of Captivity and Restoration, Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, Tobias Smollett’s Humphrey Clinker, Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Maria Edgeworth’s The Absentee, and selections from works by Edmund Burke, Phyllis Wheatley, Hannah More, Mary Wortley Montagu, and Adam Smith.