The Nineteenth-Century British Novel

The nineteenth-century British novel is where realism gets worked out as a form, absorbing Gothic, romance, and domestic conventions while wrestling with industrialization, empire, gender, and a rapidly changing class structure — this course treats the novel as a record of those pressures rather than just a reading list. You'll work through a small number of long novels in depth (typically two per semester, like Jane Eyre and Dracula), with regular short writing assignments, a midterm, a take-home final, and a term research project that pushes you toward a real critical argument. Expect to apply ecocritical, feminist, new historicist, and similar lenses, which makes this a useful bridge between the survey courses and upper-level theory or genre seminars in the ELIT track.