When, in 1914-15, Georg Lukács chose the title The Theory of the Novel for his influential work on the modern literary genre par excellence, he named a field of endeavour that has preoccupied literary theorists and critics from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present. Borrowing his title, this course sets out to engage with landmark contributions to the theory of the novel over the last century. In addition to Lukács's Hegelian (and, later, Marxist) answers to the question of why novels exist and how they function, we will canvass Russian Formalist, structuralist, post-structuralist, psychoanalytic, and narratological approaches. We'll also make certain to have two literary texts in common to enable deeply informed in-class discussion and analysis — one novel and one short story. (Is this last, the short story, cheating? Among the issues we'll address is the extent to which the theory of the novel applies to all prose fiction.)