This seminar is an exercise in how to think about the history of the novel in periods when there are no clear literary historical frameworks for understanding the form. By 1890, the heyday of the great 19th century realist novel (Dickens, Eliot, Balzac, Flaubert, Pérez Galdós, Tolstoy) had largely passed. Twenty years later, the modernist movement was recognizably underway in both literature and visual art, an event that Virginia Woolf would memorialize at modernism's height with her famously hyperbolic statement that "On or around December 1910, human character changed."

What happens in between is less clear. We tend to either understand this period in terms of a falling off from high realism (Decadence, Naturalism) or as a precursor period to modernism (Decadence, Naturalism), or in terms of locally specific movements (Decadence, Naturalism) rather than some overarching category.

In this class, we'll read a number of works produced around the world during this period to ask whether we can identify general trends, and if so how we can describe them in relationship to the broader history of the world at this time. Possibilities include Hunger (Knut Hamsun, 1890), The Country of the Pointed Firs (Sarah Orne Jewett, 1896), Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad, 1899), The Marrow of Tradition (Charles Chessnut, 1901), Esau and Jacob (Machado de Asis, 1904), The House of Mirth (Edith Wharton, 1905), and The Vagabond (Colette, 1910). One thing this list alone suggests is that this was a period of the novel's diffusion outside of the capitals of Europe, to other parts of the world (including a United States whose 19th century prose narratives took different forms than they did in Europe). In this way, the class will provide a practical experience in looking at a body of work for which there aren't widely held conceptual frameworks--an experience that can be turned to use in other contexts, whether  looking for something new in well-trod literary historical territory, or in thinking about a contemporary moment that's by its nature ongoing and undefined.