Literary historians associate the eighteenth-century with the rise of the modern novel, and, indeed, you can find in eighteenth-novels clear antecedents of genres that are still popular today.  For your convenience, I’ve listed below the genres to be covered in the video lectures that follow, along with some of the most important practitioners of those genres and their works.  This list is full of great reads; I’ve starred my three favorites, in case anybody is looking for recommendations!

I should note that Evelina comes highly recommended by 2201 students last time I taught it!

The Epistolary Novel

Epistolary novels, or novels constituted of letters among the characters, were the natural output of a society that valued letters.  Many authors, such as Alexander Pope, wrote “personal” letters with an eye toward publication. The following video introduces you to some of the most brilliant examples of the genre–from Richard’s (virtuous) Pamela to Austen’s (not-so-virtuous) Lady Susan, from renowned classics to the newly discovered Woman of Color.

Novels of Persons and Things

This lecture introduces you to two very different kinds of novel popular in the eighteenth century–novels recounting the adventures of persons and novels recounting the adventures of things.  Yes, things!  Old shoes, hansom cabs, guineas, ladies’ slippers, pincushions, articles of clothing.  If you were to write a novel or a story about a quintessentially twenty-first-century thing, what would it be?  What adventures might it have?

Daniel Defoe

Let’s switch from genres of novels to a novelist, Daniel Defoe, master of an astonishing repertoire of novels, including the first historical novel–the story of a pandemic.

William Hogarth

While not exactly a “novelist,” painter and engraver William Hogarth was an astonishing storyteller who, like our contemporary graphic novelists, used pictures to tell compelling stories of social and personal tragedies of his day.  As you’ll discover, Hogarth was a proto-photo-shopper!

The Gothic Novel

We’ll wrap up this tour of eighteenth-century novels with something completely different: the gothic novel.  Ghosts, ghouls, and demons haunt the dungeons and castles of the “Dark Ages”–except when they don’t!