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English Renaissance drama , poetry , and travel writing , early modern representations of cross-cultural contact , particularly in the Americas and Mediterranean , twentieth century approaches to race and difference in the early modern period , contemporary critical and literary theory . Other accounts studiously contain the sprawling and unruly nineteenth century by displacing it : onto France , whose symbolist poets , impressionist painters , and experimental novelists can safely be seen as the respectably subversive ancestors of modernist innovation ; or onto fin-de-siecle British aestheticism , whose decadent writers , painters , and personalities broke with mainstream Victorian culture in ways that enabled modernism to make an even bigger break later on . During the semester we will explore this claim , tracking novelistic obsessions with the foreign , the exotic , and the oriental and linking them to questions the British were asking about what it meant to be a self , what it meant to inhabit a classed and gendered body , and what it meant to read . Emerging from a variety of existing literary and rhetorical forms - - among them criminal biography , the conversion narrative , the letter , the conduct book , the diary , romance , drama , and allegory - - the novel was , before it was anything else , new . He took the Romilly manuscript and knelt before the fire .