The Twentieth-Century Novel

Course Description

This lecture course is intended as a general introduction to the twentieth-century novel in English or, to be more precise, novel-writing in the British Isles (and that, in turn, means largely, England and Ireland). Its main subject are the ‘classical’ novelists of modernism, i.e. the development of the novel genre after its break with the Victorian tradition, after the popularisation of Freudian psychology, and after the great disaster of World War I. Accordingly, the emphasis initially will be on high modernism (James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence), from where the lectures will proceed along historical lines by looking at individual writers distinguished either by their popularity as fictionists (E.M. Forster, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, Graham Greene, the neopicaresque novelists of the 1960s and 1970s) or by their acknowledged status as experimentalists (Samuel Beckett, Lawrence Durrell, Flann O’Brien). Thus, the development of the twentieth-century novel will be charted well into the 1970s. The course will be rounded off by an introduction to ‘metafiction’ as one of the truly representative modes of novel-writing in the postmodern era.

Preparatory reading:

For titles of relevant novels, please consult the reading list in the Wegweiser (issued by the Department of English).
See also the relevant chapters in Englische Literaturgeschichte, ed. Hans-Ulrich Seeber (Stuttgart, Weimar: Metzler, 1991).