# The Powers of the Novel

- Institution: Gresham College
- Speaker: Professor John Mullan
- Year: 2020
- Level: For everyone
- Language: English
- Subjects: Law, History, Literature and writing, Languages and linguistics, Art, architecture and design
- Source: [Gresham College](https://www.gresham.ac.uk/watch-now/series/novel-powers)
- Licence: [Educational use (Gresham College's terms)](https://www.gresham.ac.uk/terms-and-conditions)
- Who can watch: Teens profiles and older (sources give no ratings; placed by Invisible Network from the source's own words)

How does fiction make itself seem like fact? Professor John Mullan begins where novels begin: with Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, which showed every novel that followed how to make a ‘strange surprising’ story seem entirely ‘probable’ (the word that eighteenth-century pioneers of fiction liked t

## Lectures

1. [Convincing Fiction: Daniel Defoe to Ishiguro and Knausgaard](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/learn/gresham/series-novel-powers/5645ab97af2f) (YouTube)
2. [Crime in Fiction: Defoe and Dickens to Spark, Highsmith and McEwan](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/learn/gresham/series-novel-powers/483669c9dc6c) (YouTube)
3. [Fiction and the Supernatural: Gothic novels and the Brontës to Hilary Mantel and Sarah Waters](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/learn/gresham/series-novel-powers/3be906b70823) (YouTube)
4. [Plotting Novels: from Austen and Dickens to Agatha Christie and John le Carré](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/learn/gresham/series-novel-powers/bef3f8467b2d) (YouTube)
5. [Coincidences in the Novel: Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot to Evelyn Waugh and David Nichols](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/learn/gresham/series-novel-powers/c3a78e3ba3f5) (YouTube)
6. [Villains in the Novel: from Dickens, Hardy and Wilkie Collins to Hilary Mantel](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/learn/gresham/series-novel-powers/a5ff66664b25) (YouTube)
7. [Adultery in the Novel, from Flaubert to Sally Rooney](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/learn/gresham/series-novel-powers/4318f09e27b3) (YouTube)
8. [Historical Fiction from Sir Walter Scott to Georgette Heyer and Hilary Mantel](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/learn/gresham/series-novel-powers/28c72239bc6c) (YouTube)
9. [Endings in the Novel, from Austen and Dickens to Edward St Aubyn and Rachel Cusk](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/learn/gresham/series-novel-powers/0ba16d4a34be) (YouTube)