Defoe through Scott.

The period from which our reading draws has been credited with the “rise of the novel”—the emergence of the then new genre, the “novel,” so familiar to us today. While critics have qualified and revised that claim, the texts we’ll read do experiment with new forms of prose fiction and new ideas about what is worth representing that continue to inform our notion of what constitutes a novel. We shall investigate these forms, exploring how they might have coaxed readers into caring about characters that were not, after all, real people, and how they might have shaped what made up a sense of the “real.” We shall think about why this new form often moved between claims to be “true stories” and reminders that they were not. This cagey relation to the truth was one element that made the new form suspect, and as we read these works and track their innovations, we shall also be interested in considering what it was that some found dangerous about them. Like surfing the internet, novel reading wasn’t something you wanted the “impressionable”—in the eighteenth century, that included the young and women—to do alone, or maybe at all. Might the perceived threat have had something to do with early novels’ connection to romance and the erotic? Might it have to do with what one critic calls the “narrative transvestitism” of the early novel—in which men write books featuring female heroines who will describe, in an innovative, frank prose style, how a woman really feels? Highly conscious of these debates, eighteenth-century writers responded to them, aiming to legitimate their generic experiments through rhetorical and thematic means. They appealed to (and sometimes transformed) moral discourse, and created hybrids of new and classical forms, all offering complex new writing and, some would argue, consciousness. This class satisfies the "pre-1800" requirement for the English major.

Repeat Rules

Course is not repeatable for credit.

Requirements class fulfills