The post-World War II European novel. Following a brief summary of the history of the genre, and some discussion of major European modernist novels (by Joyce, Proust, and Kafka), the course will focus on contemporary novels whose distinctive quality is their setting in a different, mostly past era. Readings will include most or all of the following texts: John Fowles The French Lieutenant's Woman, Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, Christa Wolf's Cassandra, Marguerite Yourcenar's Memoirs of Hadrian, and Mesa Selimovic's Dervish and Death (one of the very few European novels engaging the Qur?an on a number of levels). We will examine how and why these novels choose a non-contemporary setting, and what they achieve by invoking the pre-Homeric, classic, late pre-modern, Victorian, or early twentieth-century eras. While the course offers an overview of some major theories of the novel (e.g., Bakhtin, Auerbach, Barthes, Jameson, Morson), it will chiefly be centered on an in-depth study of the literary works.