Fall 2005 Courses
English 331: The British Novel: Nineteenth Century (Çelikkol)
MWF 9:40-10:40
CAR 204
An Atlas of the Nineteenth-Century British Novel
This course examines various formulations of space and geography in
nineteenth-century British novels. We will investigate the ways in which the
novelistic imagination linked and separated regions, nations, empires, and
continents. What kinds of literary tropes distinguished urban spaces from the
countryside? Why did Britons tell stories about the farthest corners of the
empire? How did narrative techniques contribute to the consolidation of a
unified British identity? Even as we attend to novels’ imagination of a
national community, we will problematize the notion of a national literary
tradition. Can we, for example, think of the novelistic form as an
international invention? We will address these issues as we study diverse
subgenres such as the historical novel, the social-problem novel, the sensation
novel, and the realist novel. The reading list includes novels by Walter
Scott, Jane Austen, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens,
Elizabeth Braddon, Anthony Trollope, and H. Rider Haggard, as well as theory
and criticism by Mikhail Bakhtin, Benedict Anderson, Franco Moretti, and
Margaret Cohen.
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