The second of a two-part survey of English-language literature written in and around the United Kingdom, this course examines texts from 1785 to the present, paying close, critical attention to inherited literary traditions and the ways writing informs identity and vice versa. Approaching the traditional canon with an eye toward representational equity, inclusion, and social justice, students will consider questions of power, privilege, oppression, and opportunity and read historically marginalized, colonized, and BIPOC voices as central to British Literature. Students will study literary movements such as Romanticism, Victorianism, Modernism, and Post-modernism, as well as texts in translation that have influenced the development of literature in English. Topics discussed may include Industrialism, War, the rise of the New Woman, colonialism and post-colonialism, and the immigrant experience. Possible texts include Blake's illustrated Songs of Innocence and Experience, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Mary Prince's The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave, Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese, Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, Jean Rys's Wide Sargasso Sea, Salman Rushdie's "The Prophet's Hair," and Zadie Smith's, "The Waiter's Wife."