Novel Fictions: experiments in prose from Defoe to Austen

The novel as we know it came into being in Britain in the eighteenth century. This course will introduce students to the most innovative prose fiction of the period, and to the cultural contexts, and the central ideas that animate the early novel as a form. We will explore the works of writers like Daniel Defoe, Frances Burney and Jane Austen, along with major experiments in the genre like the gothic novel, amatory fiction, it-narratives (stories told from the perspective of things like coins or even atoms), epistolary novels (written entirely in letters) and satires by the likes of Henry Fielding and Eliza Haywood. We will map the ways in which experimentation in the novel form sparked creative rivalries, outrage and delight, and forged the terms of modern readership.