Instructor: Monica F Cohen
This survey of touchstone nineteenth-century European novels explores the relationship of the realist novel to urban experience and rural identity. If most novels are, in Raymond Williams’s phrase, “knowable communities,” how do fictions of the city and fictions of the country represent individual identity as it shapes and is shaped by physical context? In this light, we consider questions of youth and experience, time and space, work and leisure, men and women, landscape and portraiture, privacy and public life, national culture and cosmopolitanism, realism and romanticism. In class, we juxtapose close readings of novels with analyses of other cultural forms (paintings, operas, popular entertainment, maps) so that we come away with a broader sense of nineteenth-century European culture as well as a working knowledge of one of its most meaningful manifestations, the novel.
