ENGL 355-01, Nineteenth-Century British Novel, Fall 1998

Abstract

This course traces the development of the novel in Britain through the nineteenth century, noticing both innovations in the form of the novel--free indirect discourse, serial publication, retrospective narration-- as well as the social and psychological questions that major novels take up--wealth and poverty, industrialization, women's work, the meaning of history. We begin with a lesser-read work by Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey (written around 1798; published 1818), using this text as a lense into the popular gothic novel of the early nineteenth century, a form which Austen shrewdly satarizes. From here we notice how novelists increasingly concerned with social conditions use the conventions of the gothic romance to tell stories about politics and ethics. We will explore this combination of ancient stories and modern problems, and the broader question of history and historical change, in works from Edgeworth to Eliot. The course finishes with George Gissing's New Grub Street (1891), a book which takes as its own subject the literary world of late nineteenth-century London, and which rejects gothic or romance conventions to develop a different portrait of a society in motion.