Among the major events of the long eighteenth century was the invention of the English novel. This course tracks the early development of the novel, from the beginnings to the early nineteenth century, and may include such authors as Behn, Defoe, Richardson, Burney, Henry and Sarah Fielding, Walpole, Godwin, Wollstonecraft, and Austen. Some attention will be paid to the social contexts of the emerging genre and to its roots in such forms as the letter, the newspaper, and broadsheet criminal biography.