124070 VO Culture, Society and the Media (2020S)

PLEASE NOTE: We are currently adapting the lecture series to the new home-learning regulations. All those enrolled in the class will receive further information soon.

The British Empire may never have risen to such power without the myriad of literary and cultural works that once helped to promote it. Likewise, it may never have fallen without the help of literary and cultural works and voices that increasingly questioned colonial mindsets and beliefs. This lecture series offers an overview of literature and culture engaging with the British Empire, including both the colonial period and the postcolonial era. We will begin with a discussion of the first voyages and explorations in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and work our way towards the period of high colonialism in the nineteenth century before coming to the period of decolonization and postcolonialism in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. We will look at the way in which literature and culture not only reflected political and historical developments, but how they actively shaped them, for instance through travel writing, visual representations of colonial cultures, the collection of material objects or the dominance of the English language. We will study a wide range of primary sources, including architecture, drama, drawings, exhibitions, films, food cultures, novels, technology, travelogues, and poems. Theoretical approaches to colonialism and postcolonialism are introduced throughout the lecture series and are part of the recommended reading.