This course explores a time when neither the professional nor the disciplinary boundaries separating literature, science, medicine, and technology had solidified into their modern form. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, science and technology were very much a part of culture, an aspect of the larger intellectual life of the upper classes, not a separate sphere reserved for specialists. Quarterlies carried scientific papers side by side with political articles, poetry, and criticism, while novelists, politicians, and natural philosophers mingled together at the same clubs, attended the same lectures, and read the same books. Although disciplinary distinctions began to emerge during the second half of the century, the split between what C. P. Snow called the "two cultures" did not become an unbridgeable gulf until the twentieth century.
In this seminar we shall use the methods of cultural studies and cultural history to analyze the complex relations between novels and natural philosophy in the Victorian era. Each week a literary text will be set in the context not only of scientific and medical developments but also of Victorian engineering triumphs (railroads, steams ships, bridges, tunnels), emerging communications networks (the postal system and telegraph), consumer architecture (the Crystal Palace, department stores, shopping arcades), and new media (the stereoscope, photography, and phonograph).
Readings in the fiction of the period will be clustered around the first and middle thirds of the nineteenth century, two periods that strikingly illustrate the development of the professions and the growth of disciplinarity. Texts will include Jane Austens Persuasion; Charlotte Bronte's The Professor; Bulwer-Lytton's The Coming Race; Wilkie Collins, Heart and Science; Dickens's "Mudfog Papers" and The Pickwick Papers; George Eliot's Middlemarch; Gaskell's "Cousin Phyllis" and Wives and Daughters; and Anthony Trollopes Dr. Thorne. Students will also read excerpts from scientific texts by Charles Darwin, Francis Galton, Thomas Huxley, and William Whewell; study the engineering achievements of George Stephenson, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, and Joseph Paxton; and give reports on literary criticism and history of science.
| Jay Clayton |
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