The Novel and Romance

We revisit dominant Anglocentric accounts of the novel's origins in a wider European context, reading 14th-18th century fiction & criticism; reconsider "the novel" as a narrative epistemology of character competing with other genres, primarily romance, but also with history and drama; trace its development from a hybrid of earlier popular forms to an established literary genre in response to profound Enlightenment shifts in conceptions of gender, identity, literature, probability, sensibility, epistemology, class, family structure, industrialism, individualism, and colonialism.