This class will ask (and maybe answer?) the question: "British Literature, why can't we quit you?" Even if you've never read a Victorian classic in your life, British English and the British empire have shaped your reading experience in all kinds of ways. Everything from our expectations of what a novel should be like to our histories of racial, gender, and economic hierarchies come out of the British literary tradition, and so investigating this tradition is central to understanding our current world. We will look at some major authors and works in the literature of the British Isles written during the 19th and 20th centuries, otherwise known as the Romantic, Victorian, Modern, and Contemporary eras, and try to balance our time between big-picture considerations of large themes and close readings of individual poems and prose passages. This course is fully online and asynchronous.