What is real? How does the rise and evolution of the novel reflect or influence different understandings of reality and its relationship to fiction? This course studies the representation of reality in British and American novels written in the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries and also attends to elements in those novels that seem less than real, such as fantasies, dreams, impossible perceptions, and the paranormal. We will ask how the very different paths of the realist novel in the UK and US attempted to depict the realities of British and American communities in various local geographical contexts, and how those depictions of reality were shaped by unfolding historical events and the circulation of ideas across the Atlantic and across the British and American Empires. The course will teach you to read, discuss, interpret, and write about novels by authors like Daniel Defoe, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Stephen Crane, Pauline Hopkins, Henry James, Virginia Woolf, Charles W. Chesnutt, and James Baldwin. It’ll get real.