The Nineteenth-Century British Novel

Nineteenth-century Britain witnessed the flourishing of the novel, with the emergent techniques of realism often clashing productively with romance elements such as the Gothic. In this course, students will read some nineteenth-century British novels, discuss their role in the history of the novel, and examine them from a variety of theoretical perspectives, including ecocritical, new historicist, and feminist. The novels on the syllabus may incorporate elements of historical fiction, the Gothic, fairy tales, domestic fiction, and the Bildungsroman. Authors may include Walter Scott, Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, Thomas Hardy, or H. G. Wells. Only a couple or few of these authors will be selected in any given semester.