Major English Novels: Reading Romantic Fiction
British Romanticism produced not just poetry but a wave of experimental prose fiction, and this MIT OpenCourseWare course tracks that innovation across novels by William Godwin, Maria Edgeworth, Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, and Walter Scott. Readings cover plagues, wars, hysteria, and monsters as writers responded to the French Revolution, the Napoleonic wars, and early industrialization even in stories set far from those events. The course closes by reading Dickens's Great Expectations against these earlier texts to see how Victorian fiction inherited Romantic concerns. Materials include the full syllabus, reading schedule, and assignment sheets from MIT's undergraduate literature curriculum. Coursework consists of two essays, one 5-7 pages and one 8-10 pages, plus required in-class presentations. No video lectures are included, but the syllabus and assignments give a complete picture of how the seminar is structured and graded.