麻豆社

Robinson Crusoe, the hero of the first ever novel published in English, in 1719, was a slave trader. Right from its inception, as this programme investigates, the English novel was closely bound up with the dynamics of colonialism and marched along, in lock step, to the British Empire鈥檚 rise, decline and fall. Slavery, which predated the empire, but was an inescapable part of it, is the subject of two famous American novels more than a century apart - Harriet Beecher Stowe鈥檚 Uncle Tom鈥檚 Cabin and Toni Morrison鈥檚 Beloved. The legacy of slavery is also at the heart of one of the most famous novels of all, Charlotte Bronte鈥檚 Jane Eyre, and its 'prequel', written a century later - Jean Rhys鈥檚 Wide Sargasso Sea.

The British Empire was often taken as a given 鈥� even God-given - and widely celebrated. In the novels of some writers, though, it was questioned more deeply 鈥� such as Rudyard Kipling鈥檚 famous espionage yarn Kim. Fifty years later, a very different type of spy, James Bond, fought to keep the empire going when it had in truth already gone. By then a new voice had emerged - that of writers from the newly independent former British colonies, like Nigeria鈥檚 Chinua Achebe. At the same time, immigrants from the Caribbean were coming to the UK in search of a warm welcome and a better life. Their mixed experiences began to be told in the Trinidadian Samuel Selvon鈥檚 The Lonely Londoners, published in 1956. The twin evils of racism and slavery come full circle in recent works like the former Children鈥檚 Laureate Malorie Blackman鈥檚 series Noughts and Crosses and the 2016 Man Booker prize winner The Sellout, a savage comedy by Paul Beatty 鈥� in which a present-day African-American Los Angeleno keeps a slave.