This course introduces students to the eighteenth-century novel by considering the relative power and vulnerability attributed to readers and writers. Who got to write novels, and what kind of authority was attached to that writing? We’ll look at a number of eighteenth-century texts (novels by Defoe, Richardson, Sterne, and Burney), as well as J.M. Coetzee’s 1986 Foe, a postcolonial rewriting of works by Defoe. (B, F)