English 797(J)

ENGL 797(J): Special Studies in Literature: Detection, Empire, and Narrative Sandhya Shetty

This course offers students the opportunity to explore the relations between detection, spying, and empire in the Victorian period and in the first half of the twentieth century. Texts for study will be drawn from the work of Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle, Joseph Conrad, Rudyard Kipling, and Agatha Christie. The narratives of detection generated by these writers will allow us to focus on the interrelated questions of place, nation, Englishness, and empire. We will examine the ways in which the field of empire shapes the agents, proceedings, and outcomes of detection, even when and where it seems most at home. Therefore, the moments when these narratives knowingly or inadvertently mix the domestic with the foreign, or “home” and “the world,” will be of special interest to us as we seek to understand the overlapping local and global contexts of literary detection in both popular and canonical British fiction.

This course is available for graduate credit as English 897 (J).

Sandhya Shetty is Associate Professor of English at the University of New Hampshire.  She holds a B.A. and M.A. from the University of Pune, India and a Ph.D. from the University of Rochester. She has published articles in such journals as Genders, Journal of Modern Literature, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Diacritics, Literature Interpretation Theory, and Thesis Eleven, on a variety of topics in theory and in nineteenth and twentieth-century British and postcolonial literature and history. She is completing a book manuscript on literature, medicine, and colonialism. Her most recent publication is an essay, “The Quack Whom We Know: Nursing and Illness in Gandhi,” which appeared in an edited collection Rethinking Gandhi and Nonviolent Relationality: Global Perspectives (Routledge, 2008).