The Nineteenth-Century British Novel

Catalog description

The novel was the most popular literary form in the British nineteenth-century and continues to shape contemporary expectations of storytelling and character. Writers of the period used fiction to explore challenging issues of the day: poverty, industrialization, the growth of cities, the expansion of empire, changes in the family, and the relations between and among the sexes. This course will examine the representation of social and psychological experience in important novels of the period. Authors to be studied may include Austen, the Brontës, Dickens, Eliot,Hardy, and Wilde.