Course Description:
The novel is one of the most important genres in literary creation but its textual examples can only be mentioned briefly or at best rushed through in most of the literature courses due to the limitation of time. As one of the required fiction group courses, this one also aims at counteracting this deficiency by focusing on one particular aspect of the novel, i.e. the traditional English ones in the nineteenth century or earlier. Although usually only one classic work of around 400 pages will be chosen for study in the course, the text will be read as, among other things, illustration of what the traditional English fiction was like generically before the arrival of experimental forms of fiction-writing by modernist writers and their avant-garde followers.