The Novel EN3070

Focusing on both works originally written in English and ones in translation, the course surveys selected novels in three broad chronological groupings: eighteenth and nineteenth-century realist novels; early 20th-century modernist novels; and finally a wide-ranging exploration of the major themes and characteristic narrative strategies associated with ‘anti-realist’ or ‘postmodern’ works of fiction in the later 20th/ early 21st centuries.

The course encourages students to consider some relevant theoretical questions on the nature of narrative and the role of the reader, together with critical writing on a variety of topics, ranging from mimesis to genre. Attention will also be given to narrative techniques, including characterisation, use of imagery, narrative voice, scene-making - the strategies of fiction whereby novelists develop individual structures that enable them to say something new in fictional terms.

Learning outcomes

If you complete the course successfully, you should:

• Be able to discuss and critically evaluate debates about the development and nature of the novel from its beginnings to the present day
• Be able to recognise, understand and explain the complexity of the relationships between the formal and thematic concerns of particular novels and their historical, social and cultural contexts
• Be able to analyse and explain how individual novelists employ specific techniques in order to serve their particular narrative strategies
• Be able to compare how different novelists have used the novel to address recurrent thematic concerns and exploited the possibilities of the form in different ways

Essential reading

• Defoe, Moll Flanders
• Laclos, Les Liaisons Dangereuses
• Zola, Germinal
• Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
• Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment
• James, The Turn of the Screw
• Woolf, To the Lighthouse
• Nabokov, Lolita
• Robbe-Grillet, In the Labyrinth
• Calvino, If, On a Winter’s Night, a Traveller
• Rushdie, Midnight’s Children