Surveys key developments in the formal and socio-cultural history of the British novel, from its rise in the long eighteenth century to its preeminence during the Victorian era. Readings may include works by Aphra Behn, Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift, Samuel Richardson, Laurence Sterne, Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, the Brontës, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Oscar Wilde and Joseph Conrad.