English 60
The Rise of the Novel

Fall 2003
TR 12-1:30
314 College Hall
Office Hours: I am available continuously by email and by scheduled appointment.

When the novel emerged during the first half of the eighteenth century, it was named for what was most remarkable about it: its novelty. Emerging from a variety of existing literary and rhetorical forms--among them criminal biography, the conversion narrative, the letter, the conduct book, the diary, romance, drama, and allegory--the novel was, before it was anything else, new. The story of the rise of the novel is the story of how a new literary form became a distinct, established genre, one whose formal conventions quickly grew to be every bit as stylized as those of poetry and drama. It is also the story of how, even as the novel aged, it was--and still is--understood as a literary form with a remarkable capacity to renew itself. A defining paradox of the history of the genre is that even as it assumed a distinct form and a set repertoire of plots, the nature of the novel was such that no one could agree on what it truly was or what it could become.

This course traces the rise of the British novel from its earliest, muddled origins in other genres, through its nineteenth-century heyday as the preferred reading of a solidly respectable middle class, to its metamorphosis at the end of the nineteenth century into a means of making modernist art. Over the course of the term, we will watch a variety of writers struggling to make the novel form serve their artistic goals, their economic needs, and in some cases, their political ends. We will also watch as eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novelists and critics produced a nascent theory of the novel, paying particular attention to how individual novels meditate on what novels are, or ought, to be. Our collective aim will be to arrive at an understanding of how the history of the novel has in many ways been the history of debates about the novel--about whether novels were morally uplifting or socially threatening or both, about whether novels were art or entertainment or both, about what kinds of truths novels could tell about what kinds of subjects, and about whether, and on what terms, novels could properly claim to participate in the social and philosophical debates of their day.

Required Texts (available at Penn Book Center)

Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe
Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist
George Eliot, Scenes of Clerical Life
Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews
Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure
Samuel Richardson, Pamela

Course Requirements

One short paper (5-7 pages) due October 9
One longer paper (10-12 pages) due December 15
Weekly postings to course weblog
Regular in-class quizzes

Be sure to read the course policies carefully.

Schedule of Readings

September 4: Introduction

September 9: Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (first half)
September 11: Robinson Crusoe (second half); "Preface to Moll Flanders"

September 16: Richardson, Pamela
September 18: Pamela

September 23: Pamela
September 25: Pamela

September 30: Fielding, Joseph Andrews
October 2: Joseph Andrews

October 7: Samuel Johnson, Rambler No. 4
October 9: PAPER DUE

October 14: FALL BREAK
October 16: Austen, Northanger Abbey

October 21: Northanger Abbey
October 23: Northanger Abbey

October 28: Dickens, Oliver Twist
October 30: Oliver Twist

November 4: Oliver Twist
November 6: Eliot, "The Natural History of German Life"; "Silly Novels by Lady Novelists"

November 11: Eliot, Amos Barton
November 13: Henry James, "The Art of Fiction"

November 18: Hardy, Jude the Obscure
November 20: Jude the Obscure

November 25: Jude the Obscure
November 27: THANKSGIVING

December 2: Conrad, Heart of Darkness
December 4: synthesis

FINAL PAPER DUE: December 15