Courses:

This section features additional essay topics, though these are not required, whereas essays featured in assignments are.

1. In his influential book on eighteenth-century novels, Ian Watt wrote that, "what is often felt as the formlessness of the novel, as compared, say, with tragedy or the ode, probably follows from this: the poverty of the novel's formal conventions would seem to be the price it must pay for its realism" (The Rise of the Novel, 13). He also identified such key defining features of the realistic novel as its emphasis on particular people with realistic proper names who are set in particular times and places. Certainly Mrs. Dalloway both lacks formal conventions and emphasizes particular people in a particular place and time. In what way, then, can Woolf's novel be seen as the most realistic one we've read this semester?
   
   
2. "She felt somehow very like him–the young man who had killed himself." Why do you think Woolf constructed her novel around two such different, yet obviously paralleled, central characters?
   
   
3. Obviously Mrs. Dalloway's marriage plot–the standard feature of the nineteenth-century novel–is in the past. What other features of more traditional novels that we've read this semester does Woolf either transform or reject outright? What does she replace them with?