This course traces the foundational role that experimentation--formal, stylistic, thematic, and generic--has played in the history of prose fiction. Using the nineteenth-century novel as our point of departure, our readings will flash back to the earliest proto-novels and leap forward to 21st-century mind-benders. How do one generation's outlandish experiments in fiction become the status quo for the next? Prepare for a challenging selection of novels and short stories to include works from Cervantes, Sterne, Woolf, and Calvino.