The Novel

Posted on Jun 27, 2014 in Teaching | 0 comments

I've been convening Birkbeck's core undergraduate module "The Novel" since 2013, which is taught in the second year of the BA English degree.

My lectures on this module included The Rise of the Novel, Epic and the Novel, Naturalism, Modernism, Postmodernism, The Transnational and The Graphic Novel. This course explores the development of the novel as an international form, looking at examples from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century. It follows a loose chronology, charting the emergence of realism, modernism and postmodernism, as well as exploring the significance of postcolonialism and transnationalism for the novel. 

Course Overview:

• The Rise of the Novel (Dr Caroline Edwards): Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (1719)
• Epic and the Novel (Dr Caroline Edwards): Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews (1742)
• The Bildungsroman (Dr Mpalive Msiska): J. W. Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774)
• Realism (Dr Heather Tilley): George Eliot, Silas Marner (1861)
• Naturalism (Dr Caroline Edwards): Stephen Crane, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893)
• Modernism (Dr Caroline Edwards): Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1927)
• Postmodernism (Dr Caroline Edwards): The Crying of Lot 49 (1965)
• The Postcolonial (Dr Mpalive Msiska): Salman Rushdie, Shame (1983)
• The Transnational (Dr Caroline Edwards): Caryl Phillips, Crossing the River (1994)
• The Graphic Novel (Dr Caroline Edwards): Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood and the Story of a Return (2003)

Image by Paul Townsend under a CC BY-ND license.