3.0

credits

Average Course Rating

In this course we will read some of the most significant–and enjoyable–of nineteenth-century novels, focusing on the questions they presented for their first readers and present for readers today. Our focus will be on the technical means by which the novelists achieve their effects. How do they convey the thoughts and feelings of their characters, for instance? How do they represent the interactions between their characters within broader social environments? How do these novels represent history? How do they represent different genders? By means of what literary devices do they do all this? Our aims in the course will be to understand the fiction of the period and to see how the devices used by these authors to conceive their psychological, ethical and political worlds continue to inform our conception of our world.