ENGL 23044 - The Novel & Its Secrets

Course Credit: 1
(CMLT)
THE NOVEL & ITS SECRETS. The novel abounds with secrets. Blackmail plots, illicit love affairs, and stolen inheritances. In this course we will peek into the guilty heart of the nineteenth century, learn about the formation of the modern concept of privacy, and discuss how suspense, misdirection and revelation shape the unfolding of narrative. We will read detective stories, ghost stories, and spy novels, but we will also examine how even the realist novel collects, encodes, and circulates information–novels like Austen’s Mansfield Park, Dickens’s Great Expectations; and Charlotte Brontë’s Villette. [Before 1900] [AH]