George H. Williams

From the course catalog:

English 319. Development of the Novel. A critical and historical study of the novel surveying major novels and novelists and illustrating the characteristics of the genre, its historical development, and its reflection of significant literary periods and movements.

Under what conditions did this most popular of literary forms appear and evolve? How are contemporary novelists influenced by (or responsive to) the writers who came before? Students in this course will engage in a critical and historical study of this genre by reading four pairs of novels, each pair consisting of one early and influential work and one later one that revises, reimagines, or revisits the earlier:

• Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe and J. M. Coetzee, Foe: A Novel
• Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre and Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea
• Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary and Julian Barnes, Flaubert’s Parrot
• Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway and Michael Cunningham, The Hours