The course aims to offer a thorough knowledge of the novel genre, understood as the history of a European literary genre from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century. The chronological approach will be accompanied by a critical reflection on the historiography of the genre, as well as a particular attention to the exchanges and mutual influences that have determined its evolution. The student will be guided in the analysis of the main strands of the European novel –from the medieval courtly novel to the eighteenth-century epistolary and/or libertine novel, from nineteenth-century realism to the essay novel and the twentieth-century modernist novel – in order to understand the dynamics that have made it the most important genre in the European literary tradition.