Once derided as an “incentive to seduction,” the novel remains by far the most popular form of printed literature to this day. This course examines the changing forms of the novel in English from the eighteenth century to the present time, with an emphasis on the conjuring of time, place, and narrative desire. Starting from the picaresque novel, we see how the English novel reached its characteristic realist mode in the 1800s. We then look to modernist and post-modern writers of the greater English-speaking world, for whom the settled novelistic formulas had grown stale, and consider whether they succeeded in merely putting the genre on life support or in reviving the form for a new era. Authors may include Jane Austen, Daniel Defoe, Charles Dickens, Zadie Smith, and Virginia Woolf.