The Novel: Writing the Modern World

• Credit value: 30 credits at Level 5
• Convenor: Dr Grace Halden
• Assessment: a 1000-word essay (10%), 1500-word essay (45%) and 48-hour take-home examination (45%)

In this module we explore the development of the novel as an international form, looking at examples from the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries. We will follow a loose chronology, charting the emergence of realism, modernism and postmodernism, as well as exploring the significance of postcolonialism and transnationalism for the novel:

• Apha Behn, Oronooko (1688)
• Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759)
• Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (1719)
  
• George Eliot, Middlemarch (1871-72)
• Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1927)
• Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (1966)
• Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children (1981)
• Caryl Phillips, Crossing the River (1993)
• Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood and the Story of a Return (2003)
  

By the end of this module, you will:

• be familiar with a range of novels of different kinds and periods
• understand and be able to engage with some of the critical and theoretical discussions around the definition of the novel
• understand critical contexts related to the novel's development, such as realism, modernism, postmodernism and postcolonialism.