The Realist Novel (Europe, America, Latin America)

How did the 19th-century novel shift from at times idealistic descriptions of domestic life to realist representations of individual, psychological, social, and political “reality”? In this course on the realist novel, we will address how literary realism attempted a description of the world “as it was”: what were the social and political questions the realist novel took up? How did it conceive gender and sexuality, and how did it account for issues of social inequality, colonialism, and other types of bourgeois ideology? What national projects did non-European novels engage in, particularly in Latin America and the United States?