Rise of the Novel
Exploring History’s Greatest Early Works
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Narrated by:
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Leo Damrosch
About this listen
Thousands of novels are published around the world every year. There are so many readily available, it would take multiple lifetimes for a single person to even read a fraction of them. But it hasn’t always been that way.
While humans have always been storytellers, the novel as we recognize it today is a relatively new art form in the timeline of human culture. Of all the ways we tell stories, why has the novel become such a perennial favorite? How did the novel go from a narrative experiment with a low-brow reputation to a cultural touchstone and focal point of modern literature?
In the 24 lectures of Rise of the Novel, you will take a journey from the birth of the novel to the height of the form in the mid-19th century - and better understand what this literary form can tell us about human nature and our unquenchable thirst for great stories. With Professor Emeritus Leo Damrosch of Harvard University as your guide, you will dive into some of the most notable works that helped create and shape the novel over the course of more than three centuries, looking at the social and historical influences that coincided with shifts in literary taste along the way.
Beginning with Don Quixote - held up by many scholars as the foundational text from which the novel form would spring - Professor Damrosch will lead you through works both tragic and comic, brief and diffuse, epic and domestic. From early works like La Princesse de Clèves and Robinson Crusoe to pinnacles of the form in the 19th century such as Emma and Middlemarch - along with a few novels that are less familiar today but well worth knowing - you will dive into works with different perspectives and intentions that have all impacted our culture in their own way.
PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.
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Clark Griswold was onto something...at least with his annual holiday meltdown. And since the last three weeks of my life have been riddled with humbug—another breakup, a broken toe, an office promotion I deserved and didn’t get—I’m not at all in the mood to celebrate nor have the happ, happ, happiest Christmas EVER.
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Gaslighting and games
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By: Kate Stewart
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He's Gone
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My fiancé brought me tea and scrambled eggs in bed that morning, and we snuggled together, talking about buying our rings, and about our perfect wedding next year. Then we headed into town. He held my hand and gazed at the ring I liked best, a smile spreading slowly over his face. Then a glass of bubbly to celebrate. I felt flushed, excited and ready for the rest of my life with the man I loved. We race to get on the train home. It screams to a halt and I run towards its open doors. Made it. I think he’s right behind me — but when I turn around, he’s gone.
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Disappointing plot
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The Answer Is No
- A Short Story
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Lucas knows the perfect night entails just three things: video games, wine, and pad thai. Peanuts are a must! Other people? Not so much. Why complicate things when he’s happy alone? Then one day the apartment board, a vexing trio of authority, rings his doorbell. And Lucas’s solitude takes a startling hike. They demand to see his frying pan. Someone left one next to the recycling room overnight, and instead of removing the errant object, as Lucas suggests, they insist on finding the guilty party. But their plan backfires. Colossally.
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Narrator doesn’t get Backman’s satire or rhythm
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Starship Troopers
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Johnnie Rico never really intended to join up—and definitely not the infantry. But now that he’s in the thick of it, trying to get through combat training harder than anything he could have imagined, he knows everyone in his unit is one bad move away from buying the farm in the interstellar war the Terran Federation is waging against the Arachnids. Because everyone in the Mobile Infantry fights. And if the training doesn’t kill you, the Bugs are more than ready to finish the job.
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The definitive version!
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Dead Med
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When Heather McKinley dreamed of becoming a doctor, she imagined curing sick kids and sporting pink stethoscopes. She never anticipated the sleepless nights, grueling exams, and endless labs. And she certainly never knew that her medical school earned the nickname Dead Med thanks to the tragic history of students overdosing on illegal drugs. But Heather would never consider doing anything like that. That is, until her longtime boyfriend dumps her, she finds herself failing anatomy, and her world starts to crumble.
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Hmm
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By: Freida McFadden
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What listeners say about Rise of the Novel
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- wbiro
- 08-29-22
Shed New Light
Shed additional light on several novels and authors for me. What ties them all together is Continued Universal Human Cluelessness.
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- Bruce Bortz
- 10-18-22
Great Teacher
Great material. Thoroughly enjoyable. Looked forward to each lecture and was never disappointed. Will even listen again.
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- D
- 10-27-22
So good to hear anyone’s reaction to Middlemarch.
Any time someone reflects on how they responded to Middlemarch it’s consistently surprising. Hearing any such account always makes world always feels more human. Many thanks,👏
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- Bruce
- 02-08-22
the more I read the further behind I get
I had read about half of this course list. The course motivated me to re-listen to them and am working my way through the remainder - a couple are not available on Audible and I just need an energy drink to finish Clarissa. That is what I expected the course to do; it keeps me fresh in my own classes. But I'd wish for more clarity on parameters. More definition of what makes a novel: why are Tale of Genji, Beowulf not novels? Why did he select what he did? Why Henry Fielding and not his sister's novel? Why include Spanish, French and German and not Russian, Canadian or Asian? Obviously no great American novelists existed before the 20th century. Why are mid 19th century works considered "early"? I think a better title for this course would have been "Pre 20th Century Novels I Liked".
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3 people found this helpful
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- Gilbert M. Stack
- 08-29-21
This One Just Didn't Work for Me
I love the Great Courses, but this particular set of lectures didn’t work for me. It focuses on 24 books that show different aspects of the growth of the form of the novel. I hadn’t read most of the books, but even for those I had read, I had difficulty getting more than halfway through each lecture. Generally, I felt that Damrosch made his point in the first few minutes of each and the rest of the detail just didn’t interest me.
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1 person found this helpful