Salient topics of this course are as follows : The novel : birth of a genre in the eighteenth century; literary ancestors of the novel; evolution of the form; its coming of age in the nineteenth century; status of the novel as an artform; potential for experimentation; self - consciousness and metafiction; the novel in the age of modernism and postmodernism. In the twentieth century the evolution of the novel form has involved interesting and unconventional experiments such as John Fowles"s the French Lieutenant:s Woman(FLW)(1969), for instance which adapt the literary form of the historical novel into metafiction and magic realism respectively. As a result a radical mode of reading is called for from the reader. FLW among other things offers two endings from which the reader is invited to choose one.