Subject Area: English

The course introduces students to selected major English novels from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, considering how novels responded to the social contexts in which they were produced. We will explore novelists’ development of new techniques of literary realism and their adaptation of older narrative forms such as romance and epic. The course will include consideration of various formal features of the genre, and their use in creating narratives of self and society. Students will be encouraged to engage critically with arguments by historians and literary critics that the novel functioned as a vehicle for social, economic and national ideologies.