Literature of Lost Lands

This course hopes to entice you into readings in the literature of lost and submerged continents, as well as of remote lands hidden from history. While now often relegated to the stuff of science fiction, accounts of submerged land-masses were among the most serious popular literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and readers were riveted by the enduring mystery about the lost continents of Atlantis and Lemuria. Works about these and other lost lands inspired a form of “occult ethnography.” Novels such as The Coming Race (1871) drew on the popular fascination with buried land-masses in order to re-imagine alternative narratives in which the “imperial English” would be colonized by a new race of people rising from the forgotten depths of the earth. At one level, the use of ethnographic details in such novels provided an ironic commentary on the European ethnographies of colonized peoples. But at another level it also offered a visionary description of a world as yet unseen and unknown, so that the idea of the past itself becomes less stable in the cultural imagination. In animating the details of a rediscovered people, occult ethnography both drew on and subverted evolutionary models of development by showing these “lost” people, in some instances, to have reached the highest perfection possible, both in technological capability and human potential. The unsettling of established and familiar conceptions of nation, history, and cultural identity through the exploration of lost or drifting lands reaches an apex in José Saramago’s The Stone Raft (1986). In probing the enduring fascination with lost or separated lands in the cultural imagination, the course hopes to illuminate the importance of such literature in unveiling the processes of colonization, ethnography, nationalism, evolution, and technology, as well as understanding the writing of history itself: i.e., what is included in mainstream accounts and what is left out.