ENL4112 - Spring - Ward

Yes!!! There were novels written and read long before the works of Jane Austen and the Bronte sisters appeared! This course will introduce you to a variety of eighteenth-century novels that preceded later, perhaps more familiar works like Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre. In addition to the novels themselves, you will also learn about the material and cultural contexts in which they were produced. What literary historians call the “rise of the novel,” for instance, coincided with the rise of colonialism and capitalism as dominant global forces; this resulted in novels that mirrored and produced the culture from which they emerged. In other words, the eighteenth-century narratives we will read both reflected and shaped the entangled histories of the English-language novel, the rise of Britain’s colonial empire, the peak of the Atlantic slave trade, and the revolutionary social reform movements of the same period.

This course meets the Genre and Pre1800 Requirements