The Rise Of The Novel

AY2015/2016 Semester 1

Eighteenth-century English readers recognized the "novel" as a new literary form that borrowed from previous narrative traditions such as the spiritual autobiography, romance, the picaresque tale, criminal biography, and travel literature. As a genre the "novel" raises questions of authority, tradition, convention, and innovation: What distinguishes creation from bastardization? What types of "mixing" are acceptable and which are not? How is something recognized as genuinely new and how is it incorporated into an existing tradition? The issue of identity is central to the "novel" as a literary form and is reflected in its subject matter. The genre enabled authors and readers to explore the subjectivity of the individual self, the constitution of identity within a specific environment, and the relationship between "self" and "other." From the new worlds made available by technological innovations such as the microscope and telescope to Robinson Crusoe's disorientation at seeing a mysterious footprint in the sand, encountering the strange, the foreign, and the shocking broadened the perspectives and possibilities of literature in novel ways. The course will cover the development of the eighteenth century English novel as a narrative form while analyzing the different literary choices and innovations used to represent identity and its response to novelty. We will study how novelists used and adapted their narrative form to negotiate conflicts of class, nation, gender, family, religion, and literary tradition. By the end of the course, students will have a sound familiarity with the history and development of the eighteenth-century English novel and will have acquired the vocabulary and analytical tools to think critically about the form and function of the novel.