ENGL 337 A: The Modern Novel

The modern novel in English was a global phenomenon. It owed much to the British empire, which had colonized over a quarter of the world by the 20th century, a process involving cultural as well as political-economic domination. Across Britain’s imperial orbit, novelists critically engaged with the colonial modernity of which they were a product. This course takes a global and comparative approach, exploring writing from countries that may include England, Ireland, Scotland, the Caribbean, and India. We will consider the ways in which the novel form contributes to national culture and what kinds of identities emerge in the violent matrix of empire. Writers may include Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen, Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Flann O’Brien, Raja Rao, CLR James.