ENGLISH LITERATURE 3

Novel Identities

We shall work on the eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century experimental genre of the novel and cross this approach with a thematic reading of novels as documents and instruments of self- and nation-building, as sites for gender and class construction and confrontation.
By using the term 'Bildungsroman' as leading keyword, we will work on Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels as far as the eighteenth century is concerned; we shall later move on to Wuthering Heights by E. Bronte, Tess of the d'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy as examples of nineteenth-century literary production.