Rise of the Novel

Catalog description

This course explores the history of the British novel and the diverse strategie of style, structure, characterization, and narrative techniques it has deployed since the late seventeenth century. While works from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries will form the core of the reading, some versions of this course will include twentieth-century works. All will provide students with the opportunity to test the advantages and limitations of a variety of critical approaches to the novel as a genre. Readings may include works by Behn, Swift, Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Lennox, Smollett, Burney, Scott, Austen, the Brontes, Dickens, Eliot, Hardy, Conrad, Joyce, Lawrence, Woolf, Rhys, Greene, Naipaul, Carter, Rushdie, and Coetzee. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.