This course aims to provide students with some historical and critical perspectives on an evolving aesthetic form central to English studies. 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 twentieth-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 twentieth/early twenty-first 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.
By the end of the course you should be able to:
One three-hour unseen examination.