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The British Novel

ENGL 203.001
instructor(s):
MWF 12-1

We will take a variety of approaches to exemplary British novels and consider how developments in the novel can be understood as a history of our own values and expectations.  Attending to constructions of the self and social institutions (for example in the invention and/or reproduction of childhood, the psyche, the body, sexuality, the nation, education, maternity, and marriage), we will read novels by Defoe, Radcliff, Bronte, Dickens, Eliot, Carroll, Hardy, Lawrence, Woolf, and Rhys and assess continuity and change in the genre from eighteenth-century experiments in Gothic romance, fantasy, and social realism through the immensely popular (and often immense) middle-class novels of the Romantic and Victorian periods to experiments of early modernism with their greater emphasis on psychological realism and their greater suspicion of language's capacity to conjure the real.   

Note: Students who want an alternative way of fulfilling the usual English 203 requirement may do so by taking any two of the following courses: English 45, English 55, English 65.

fulfills requirements