The House of Fiction: Literary Realism

This subject introduces students to the multifaceted, dynamic and changing genre of domestic realist fiction, from the early nineteenth-century country-house novel to recent forms such as the graphic novel and the contemporary global novel of immigrant and cosmopolitan life. Reading eight novels alongside theory of the novel that emerged with its practice, the subject asks: how has the genre been transformed within the fictions themselves and through this theory and critical reception? Traditionally associated with the eighteenth-century “rise” of the novel that consecrated the bourgeois marriage plot and the “omniscient” narrator, realist fiction has been re-energized through queer re-imaginings of intimacy and the family; critical questioning of realism’s long association with objectivity and reportage; and a new attunement to realism’s artfulness, non-narrative features, affective textures, ironic and satirical energies, and intertextual allusiveness.