18th c. British Fiction || UMM

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18th c. British Fiction

The novel as we know it originated in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century. As it developed, the genre borrowed elements not only from epic and tragedy but from the many prose traditions that predated and/or developed alongside the novel: romance, allegory, satire, history, picaresque, travel literature, spiritual (auto)biography, criminal biography and confession fiction, letters, etiquette and conduct manuals, political pamphlets, slave narratives. Different authors funneled these disparate genre elements into the novel's range of possibilities in various (and occasionally contradictory) ways.

In this course, we'll talk about the effects of those genre elements on eighteenth century novels' range of structures, methods of characterization, representations of time, managing of point of view, and experiments in formal realism. The reading load in this course is demanding; consider carefully before committing to any other courses with heavy reading.

course documents

syllabus

maps

British Library historical maps

London, Westminster, and Southwark (John Rocque, 1746)

London section of Actual Survey of the Country 15 miles round London (John Carey, 1786)

Plan of London and Westminster (Richard Horwood, 1792-1799)

a simplified map of London

Writing at UMM