This course is a survey of the novel in English from 1700 to the present day. Once derided as an "incentive to seduction," the novel achieved critical acclaim as well as cultural prominence in the mid-nineteenth century; it remains by far the most popular form of printed literature to this day. Starting from the picaresque novel of the eighteenth century, we see how the English novel reached its characteristic mode in the 1800s, with Austen’s domestic drama and Dickens’s sentimental realism. We then look to twentieth-century writers of the greater English-speaking world, for whom the settled novelistic formulas had grown stale, and consider whether they have succeeded in merely putting the genre on life support or in reviving the form for a new era. Readings include: Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe; Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice; Charles Dickens, Great Expectations; Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse; Salman Rushdie, Shame; and Edward P. Jones, The Known World.