ENGL 24021 - Before the Novel

This course explores forms of writing that pre-dated and influenced the novel. Genres include the sonnet sequence as the origin of the idea of the conflicted self, Elizabethan and Jacobean theater (such as Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Much Ado About Nothing) as significant influences on the structure of the novel, the emergence of satirical works in the seventeenth century, and non-novelistic sixteenth and seventeenth- century prose fictions such as Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688) and Sir Philip Sidney’s The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (1580). Students consider how these works emerge from earlier, manuscript notions of fiction as well as the developing cultures of theater and print. [Before 1800]

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