This module introduces students to classics of nineteenth-century fiction, primarily British but also including two famous French novels to provide comparative foil. The lectures will direct attention to such formal and ideological matters as the free indirect style, literary realism, authorial omniscience and moral didacticism, the representation of history, comic and gothic elements, and the shift towards aestheticism and impressionism in the second half of the century. These features will be related to larger patterns of social change, notably changing relations between social classes, the role of the novel in bourgeois ideology, moral urgency and complacency, the repression of women, the retreat from progressive models of history and the development of a commodifying cultural sphere.