Course title: Fiction 小說選讀一 班次：01
Lecturer: Pi-tai Peng

Course description:
This course will study four English novels written traversing a long period of time since the novel’s most dominant era in the nineteenth century to the current day, by British and American fiction writers who have been either celebrated as the great novelists in their respective literary periods, or regarded as major contemporary writers who have played a crucial role in the evolutionary change of the novel as a genre. The authors that will be studied are George Eliot, Henry James, John Fowles, and Don DeLillo, and the novels selected for each novelist are in turn Middlemarch, The Portrait of a Lady, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, and White Noise. This temporally, culturally expansive selection is made with a view to tracing not just the developments and shifts the novel has undergone in theme and form over time but the cultural, historical conditions that have produced or contributed to them, while at the same time we will also be examining the literary movements—realism, modernism, postmodernism—that have informed them or they have exemplified or responded to.

This course is designed for one year though can be taken independently as a one-semester course. For each semester two novelists will be read, with the first semester focused on Middlemarch and The Portrait of a Lady, with the second on The French Lieutenant’s Woman and White Noise.