106-122 Colonial Fiction and Travel Writing

Credit Points

HECS Band

Coordinator

Prerequisites

Usually admission to the Postgraduate Diploma or Fourth Year Honours in English, see Honours entry.

Semester

Subject Description

This subject asks students to tackle critical questions through the reading of representative texts produced in the colonial period and the work of postcolonial critics engaged in the study of colonialism. These questions include: What was literature's relationship to Empire? Did fiction provide writers with a space for critical reflection besides serving to reinforce colonialist ideologies? What were these ideologies? What sorts of political, social and aesthetic concepts did travel writers use to portray their encounters with foreign landscapes and peoples and to what extent were their writings compatible with the notion of Empire? On completion of the subject students should be able to read and write critically about the representational structures used by colonial fiction and travel writers and be able to apply aspects of postcolonial criticism to the reading of colonial texts.