This is a course for anyone interested in the early novel, and focusses on prose fictions from the period 1740-1830, which is to say the development of the novel from its early appearances through into the Romantic period. If you have taken Victorian Literature, this is the story of how the novel developed prior to the appearance of writers such as Dickens and the Brontës. We look at the kinds of literature that fed into the early novel (such as journalism and travel writing), and the material conditions that were necessary to its development (print technologies and so on). We consider a wide range of related topics such as sensibility, the physiology of emotion, realism, and editing, and—in the context of the ongoing history of misogyny—we pay particular attention to the astonishingly courageous, radical, inventive, psychologically insightful, and funny writing of the women authors of the period. Writers on the course typically include Mary Davys, Samuel Richardson, Laurence Sterne, Horace Walpole, Henry Mackenzie, Mary Hays, Mary Wollstonecraft, Jane Austen, and James Hogg.