This course approaches British literature from a perspective informed by “cultural studies” and stresses the transnational circulation of peoples, ideas, and commodities in the so-called “Atlantic world” of the late eighteenth century. The era was powerfully affected by a number of dramatic and far-reaching cultural, economic and, political changes, including the global expansion of trade/exploration; unsettling and frequently violent political revolutions in France, North America, and the Caribbean; a spreading faith in what was supposed to be humankind’s inherent capacity for reason; and the increasing sense that men made their own secular histories. The course traces these developments through the study of texts by Johnson, Equiano, Burke, Blake, and Austen, among others.