Courses:

Course Info

• Course Number / Code:
• 21L.471 (Spring 2004) 
• Course Title:
• Major English Novels 
• Course Level:
• Undergraduate 
• Offered by :
• Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
  Massachusetts, United States  
• Department:
• Literature 
• Course Instructor(s):
• Prof. James Buzard 
• Course Introduction:
•  
• 
  
  21L.471 Major English Novels
  
  
  
  

  Spring 2004

  
  
  

  
  
  

  Course Highlights

  
  
  

  All exams and most of the readings used in the course may be downloaded.

  
  
  

  Course Description

  
  
  

  This course studies several important examples of the genre that between the early 18th century and the end of the 20th has come to seem the definitive literary form for representing and coming to terms with modernity. Syllabi vary, but the class usually attempts to convey a sense of the form's development over the past few centuries. Among topics likely to be considered are: developments in narrative technique, the novel's relation to history, national versus linguistic definitions of an "English" novel, social criticism in the novel, realism versus "romance," the novel's construction of subjectivities. Writers studied have included Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, Samuel Richardson, Lawrence Sterne, Mary Shelley, Jane Austen, Walter Scott, Emily and Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Joseph Conrad, H. G. Wells, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Salman Rushdie.