The Powers of the Novel

A series of lectures presented by Gresham College.

These lectures will be given by Professor John Mullan, Visiting Professor of English Literature.

How did the novel – that upstart literary form – come to dominate the literary marketplace?  How do novels seize and absorb the attention of their readers?

In this lecture series Visiting Professor John Mullan will combine his scholarly expertise in the history of the English novel in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with his interest in contemporary fiction.

The nine lectures look at the formal tricks and devices of modern literary fiction, but also see how these reach back to the innovations of the great eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novelists.