ENGL 247 - Eighteenth-Century British Novels

Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)

For readers today, the novel is both the most familiar and the most established form of literature: an inevitable and unremarkable presence in high school and college English classes and newspaper and magazine book reviews, behind film and television adaptations, and on nightstands around the world. And yet, the very name “novel” suggests the form’s unfamiliarity: its association with the surprising, the revolutionary, the modern, the new. This tension— between conventions and institutions of the novel and its novelty—is our focus in this class, as we examine the origins of the form in the culture of eighteenth-century Britain. If the novel (as critic Ian Watt famously put it) tells the story of “particular individuals having particular experiences at particular times and at particular places,” we ask why the novel emerged at this particular time and in this particular place, considering its ties to socioeconomic, political, and cultural transformations including the rise of the middle class, nationalism, the expansion of global capitalism, the reconfiguration of gender roles, and the constitution of the modern self.

Reading major early novels by Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, Samuel Richardson, Laurence Sterne, and Frances Burney alongside short extracts from other fictional and non-fictional genres, this class aims both to introduce students to the traditional “Rise of the Novel” narrative and to complicate it, positioning “novelistic” prose within the astonishingly vibrant and creative landscape of eighteenth-century writing. Works of fiction in the eighteenth century rarely identified themselves as “novels,” preferring a host of other labels including romances, tales, sketches, or histories; throughout the semester, we examine the novel’s relationships— parasitic, competitive, companionate, etc.—with these other categories, ending in its decisive victory. At the same time, we reconstruct the novel’s dramatic ascent from the very bottom of the hierarchy of artistic value at the beginning of the eighteenth century to a serious and significant art form by the beginning of the nineteenth. Mark Taylor.

Prerequisite(s): Open to sophomores, juniors, and seniors with one unit of 100-level work or by permission of the associate chair

The course satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.

Two 75-minute periods.

Course Format: CLS