Vorlesungs- und Lehrendenverzeichnis

SoSe 2021

The State of the Nation Novel

Harald Pittel

PULS

The state-of-the-nation novel is a name given to a specifically British type of political prose narrative, modelled on a certain strand of Victorian novels – most notably, works by Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell and Anthony Trollope – and generally featuring a complex constellation of various characters in an urban setting, typically conveying a modern sense of alienation and moral confusion. While one might dismiss this traditional approach to probing into the structure of feeling of a nation at a specific time (including its political elites and the larger society) as somewhat dated and overcome, the state-of-the-nation novel has had a recent revival with the so-called Brexit Fiction associated with writers like Jonathan Coe, Anthony Cartwright, Ali Smith and Amanda Craig.

This course will look at the state-of-the-nation novel in various historical contexts, paying special attention to its most recent figuration after the Brexit referendum. A general question will be how this national approach to literature writing can nonetheless be understood as a kind of world literature engaging with the effects of globalisation.

Literatur

Parrinder, Patrick. Nation and Novel: The English Novel from its Origins to the Present Day, Oxford UP, 2006.
Eaglestone, Robert, ed. Brexit and Literature: Critical and Cultural Responses, Routledge, 2018.

Leistungspunkterwerb

Participation in forum discussions (3 entries in the course of the semester) to pass (ungraded). Term papers (graded) are also possible.

Studiengänge und Module

• Einrichtungen
• Veranstaltungen
• Lehrende
• Hinweise

• PULS-Login

Kontakt

Universität Potsdam
Philosophische Fakultät
Am Neuen Palais 10
14469 Potsdam