This course surveys several major novels in order to understand the genre that came to dominate literary culture in the Victorian era. Topics may include realism, the marriage plot, the social-problem novel, feminism and sexual identity, novels of growing up, the city, and seriality. Authors may include Dickens, Thackeray, E. Bronte, C. Bronte, Gaskell, Trollope, Eliot, Collins, Hardy, Gissing, and Wilde, among others.