Early Twentieth-Century Fiction, Fall 2025

This course tells two stories about the revolutionary period in twentieth-century literature in English beginning around 1890 and running to the start of the Second World War in 1945. The first story is the story of the modernist breakthrough, when radical innovators transformed how the novel could be written: we will read writers like James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and William Faulkner for their singular experiments in form and content. The second story is the story of the radical expansion of literary production and consumption to new populations, giving rise to new literatures as different as specialized genre fiction, the Indian English novel, and the African-American novel. We will read exemplary works from each of these bodies of writing. Students will learn to analyze what is and is not shared across the radically varied field of early twentieth-century fiction, and to understand the variety of these fictions as a result of social contestation and collaboration.

Detailed syllabus: syllabus.pdf.

This page last updated: December 3, 2025.