The Eighteenth Century in Europe

Recontextualizing the `Rise of the Novel': We revisit dominant Anglocentric accounts of the novel's origins in a wider European context, reading 17th-18th century fiction & criticism; reconsider "the novel" as a narrative epistemology of character competing with other genres (history, romance, drama); trace its development from a hybrid of earlier popular forms to an established literary genre, now the predominant one, in response to profound shifts in conceptions of gender, identity, literature, probability, sensibility, epistemology, the rise of the middle class, the nuclear family, industrialism, individualism, and colonialism.