This course will emphasize issues of form in connection with modes and ideologies of nineteenth-century realist fiction. We will read a cross-section of European fiction (shorter works to the extent possible), together with representative 19th-century manifestos and influential 20th-century criticism. Students will give an in-class report and write a 4000-6000 word essay on a novel or an issue in the theory of realism. For the first week we will examine the strategies of representation in a "typical" realist novel, Effi Briest by Theodor Fontane; please read it, or a substantial portion of it, before the first meeting. The remaining fictional readings will be:

Walter Scott, The Heart of Mid-Lothian
Honoré de Balzac, The Old Maid (La Vieille Fille)
Stendahl, The Red and the Black (Le Rouge et le noir)
Charles Dickens, Hard Times
Giovanni Verga, short stories from the collection Life in the Country

Essays and secondary readings will come from such authors as Scott, Balzac, George Eliot, Flaubert, Chernyshevsky, Zola, James; Lukács, Auerbach, Barthes, Jameson, Gallagher, Moretti.

Read the works in the original languages when you can.