When Novels Were New

Harvard FAS

What was it like to read and write a novel at a moment before that term named a stable category and before the genre’s conventions were established? How did it feel to be a writer or reader in an era when the novel was (as Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding each put it in the middle of the century) “a new species” or “new province” of writing? This class is devoted to the remarkable record of literary experimentation that forms the history of the early novel. As we study works by…