Dickens, Eliot, and James

Focusing on three of its greatest creators, this course will formulate different ways of thinking about the novel in English. Inevitably, we will be led to large questions about the representation of reality and of human consciousness, about the novels embeddedness in socio-political reality, about perspective and vision and the limits of human knowledge, for example. But our primary focus will be close readings, and we will need to develop ways of talking, concretely, about what novels do and about how they are put together. Readings will include works by Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Henry James.