Dickens and Eliot

Major novels by Charles Dickens and George Eliot, with a focus on our readerly and critical engagement with this basic category (major novel). Why such long narratives, such complicated plots, such multifarious character-systems? Why the strange mixture of realism and aesthetic eccentricity? How do we experience and understand the conspicuous scale, density, energy, or excess of such novels as Pickwick Papers, Bleak House, Mill on the Floss, Middlemarch? The focus of the seminar will be reading these challenging, provoking, seductive texts; on the peculiar reading experiences produced by the nineteenth-century novel; and the history of critical response to this experience.