This course provides intensive study in the English novel in the nineteenth century, when the genre became the most popular literary form in a period that saw the explosive growth of the English reading nation amidst social and economic transformations under British capital and empire. The course adopts the discourse of "the Gothic" as an interpretive framework for closely reading and historically contextualizing the genre of the novel. We will read and discuss seven novels from the period, together with contemporary literary criticism and scholarship about them.