ENG 370 18th Century English Novel
In this course, we will study the eighteenth-century novels in which authors worked out the fundamental matter of what a novel even is. Eighteenth-century authors and readers were still figuring out the relation between history and fiction and what it meant to believe in a work of fiction. We will read with the goal of revivifying the eighteenth-century sense that engaging with a work of fiction is a mysterious - and potentially dangerous - practice. We will also consider the novel within the intellectual historical context of the Enlightenment, which overlaps with the age of satire, the age of sensibility, and the age of the gothic.