This course will focus on the historical dimension of the contemporary novel. We will explore historical fiction, the novel’s engagement with history and with questions of historical truth, and the interplay between the personal and the historical in recent fiction writing. Works for this course are chosen to represent a broad historical and geographical range. Theorizations of the historical novel as well as the historical contexts of works on the syllabus will be studied in detail. The international list of authors on the syllabus (from the U.K., Ireland, New Zealand, Israel, Spain, the U.S., South Africa and Germany) will include works by the following authors: John Fowles, Claire Keegan, Damon Galgut, Lloyd Jones, A. B. Yehoshua, Javier Cercas, Jenny Erpenbeck, Graeme Mcrae Burnet, and Deborah Levy.
Requirements include short and long written assignments, class participation, and presentations.
