Major English Novels
MIT OpenCourseWare's literature survey traces the English novel from its early 18th-century origins to the late 20th century, treating it as the literary form best suited to grappling with modernity. The syllabus covers developments in narrative technique, the novel's relationship to history, debates over what counts as an "English" novel, social criticism embedded in fiction, the split between realism and romance, and how novels construct interior subjectivity. Authors studied include Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, Samuel Richardson, Laurence Sterne, Mary Shelley, Jane Austen, Walter Scott, Emily and Charlotte Bronte, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Joseph Conrad, H. G. Wells, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Salman Rushdie. Course materials include the full syllabus, reading assignments, and MIT's course structure, free to access through OpenCourseWare with no certificate offered.