Regent Street Cinema, 307 Regent Street, London W1B 2HW.
Writing in 1800, the romantic critic Friedrich Schlegel famously proposed that if the literature of the ancient Greeks began with the epic, ‘our literature’ began, above all, ‘with the novel’. In this inaugural lecture Professor David Cunningham will discuss the different ways in which the novel has been understood as perhaps the distinctively modern literary genre, and why the novel emerged as a new literary form in the historical moment that it did.
While much previous criticism has stressed the connection between the rise of the novel and the rise of a newly confident middle class in Europe, this lecture will consider the equally important links between the novel and the economic and social forms of capitalism. The lecture will discuss what this may have to tell us about recent developments both in the study of literature and in the contemporary novel itself.
The lecture will be followed by a drinks reception in University of Westminster Regent St Foyer
