ENG322H1

The Rise of the Novel

This course traces the emergence of the modern novel between the late seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries, with special attention to innovations and experiments in narrative form, the mingling of genres in the early novel, and the wide thematic range of the period’s fiction. The focus is both technical and thematic: on the formally self-conscious quality of much eighteenth-century narrative, and on novelists’ use of the genre to address a broad range of issues such as selfhood and subjective experience; local and national identities; race, gender, ethnicity, and class relations; urban experience and social change; sympathy and community; politics and empire. Authors studied may include Behn, Defoe, Haywood, Richardson, Fielding, Sterne, Smollett, Austen; some attention may also be paid to related genres (e.g. journalism, autobiography, diaries, letters) that influenced, and were influenced by, the themes and conventions of the emergent novel.