Department of English

This course will trace the evolution of the novel in Britain, from the time of its emergence out of the "news/novels" discourse of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, through its period of cultural dominance in the Victorian era, to the beginnings of its cultural marginalization as aesthetic object by twentieth-century Modernism.  We will focus both on the evolution of the novel's form and on the extension and later contraction of its representational range.  The writers we will be reading include:  Aphra Behn (Oroonoko), Daniel Defoe (Robinson Crusoe), Jane Austen (Emma), Charlotte Bronte (Jane Eyre), Charles Dickens (David Copperfield), Thomas Hardy (Jude the Obscure), Joseph Conrad (The Secret Agent), and Virginia Woolf (To the Lighthouse).  Requirements include 2 brief critical papers and one longer critical research paper.