Aspects of the Novel

The novel is the dominant literary form of the last three centuries; its variations are numberless, its spread global. What can be said then about what a novel is, or how a novel works? What are some of the ways the form of the novel has been understood? This course is an introduction to the study of the novel as a formal and cultural phenomenon, taking in examples from the eighteenth century to the twenty-first, while attending to major landmarks in the “theory of the novel.”