The 19th-Century Novel: Transatlantic Perspectives

What happened when the novel crossed the Atlantic? After its rise in Europe in the mid 18th century, the novel quickly spread and became a dominant literary genre both in the U.S. and in Latin America. In this course we will read key 19th-century novels in the European tradition; we will then discuss how this (by no means homogenous) European genre was assimilated and modified across the Atlantic. What did writers in Brazil and in the U.S. do with the genre, and how did they transform it according to national specificities? We will focus on English, French, American, and Brazilian novels.