What is a novel? The answer to this question depends on who and when you ask. In addition to romances, literary historians have associated what we can only uncomfortably call the eighteenth-century “novel” with other forms of literature including newspapers, secret histories, and conduct manuals. The full titles of Eliza Haywood’s works classified many of them as novels, but in the first decades of the eighteenth century “novel” was used almost interchangeably with “romance.” Samuel Richardson denied that his novels were novels at all; so too did Daniel Defoe and Henry Fielding. Samuel Johnson thought Sterne’s Tristram Shandy was too odd to last, and Jane Austen thought gothic novels like those of Anne Radcliffe had already lasted too long. As we discuss the historical, cultural, and political circumstances out of which this long-lived and multifaceted form of prose fiction emerged, we will also interrogate the form itself by examining its changing features and functions over the course of the eighteenth century.
Prerequisite: Any 190 or 200 level literature course or permission from instructor.