The Victorian era (1837-1901) saw itself as a time of incredibly rapid and disorienting social, cultural, and technological change. Factors ranging from the Industrial Revolution to Darwin’s theory of evolution generated the widespread sense that old certainties—whether about humanity’s place in the universe or women’s place in society, about the nature of the social order or the nature of reality itself—were becoming obsolete: “all that is solid melts into air,” as Marx and Engels famously put it. This course will explore how the period’s dominant literary form, the novel, registered and responded to these historic shifts. What formal techniques, we will ask, did novelists devise to capture the terrifying dislocations, thrilling opportunities, and sheer complexity of the modern world?