In the eighteenth-century, readers began encountering a variety of factual and fictional “lives” in print. With new genres such as the novel, the biography, the secret history, the roman a clef, the criminal memoir, and the letter collection, the period saw a new interest in documenting and describing individual, everyday life. This marked a shift from previous eras of literature, which had often focused more on communal myths and representative experiences than on specific histories. This course will investigate the new ways of exploring real or realistic lives in both fact and fiction.