| Abstract: |
This course illustrates how literary theory is applied to the nineteenth-century novel. The approach is basically practical, focussing on how approaches such as formalism, Marxism, feminism, psychoanalysis (to name only a few schools) have studied and discussed fiction, and how-in light of this-students are better enabled to read both fiction and critical material. The nineteenth-century novel is chosen for two basic reasons: first, for its focus on the modern institutions of life which theory has taken a deep interest in, such as romance, marriage, the family or the nation-state; second, the nineteenth-century novel not only represents one of the so-called "golden ages" of English literature, but also because the novel is the genre-and the 1800s the century-that all critical schools have arguably felt the need to analyse in particular depth, plausibly because of the fundamental role that this genre and this century play in the understanding of contemporary literature. |
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