English Studies (ENGL) - Rise and Development of the Novel Literature

ENGL 3525  Rise and Development of the Novel Literature

Prerequisites:

Six credits of 2000 level English (excluding ENGL 2001, ENGL 2002 and ENGL 2011).

Hours:

Three hours of lecture per week.

Credits:

6

Description:

This course is designed to explore the issues surrounding the emergence of ""the novel"" as a distinct and dominant narrative form in English. The origins of the novel are marked by writers' experiments with a great variety of forms and techniques in fiction, as the novel as a distinct genre emerges from a range of types of prose writing: travelogues, familiar letters, autobiographies, philosophical treatises. We will trace the emergence of the oppositions between the fictive and the historical, each with its own distinct claims to ""truth"", between ""realism"" and ""romance"" as two different types of fiction, and between attitudes to ""masculine"" and ""feminine"" modes of writing, as the grounding conditions for the emergence of the novel. We will also be considering the political and religious values at stake in these oppositions, by relating prose fiction to contemporary political, material, and economic developments.