English 318 - Science and the Nineteenth-Century Novel (graduate seminar)
This course explores a time when the disciplinary boundaries separating literature, science, technology, and criticism had not solidified into their modern form. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, science was very much a part of culture, an aspect of the larger intellectual life, not a separate sphere reserved for specialists. Journals 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. For example, Sir Walter Scott served a term as President of the chief scientific society in Scotland, and Charles Babbage, the famous mathematician and pioneer of computer science, knew Dickens well. 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 well into the twentieth century.
In this seminar we 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 developments but also of Victorian engineering triumphs (railroads, steams ships, bridges, tunnels), emerging communications networks (the postal system, telegraph, telephone), consumer architecture (the Crystal Palace, department stores, shopping arcades), and new media (the stereoscope, photography, phonograph).
Readings inthe fiction of the period will include Jane Austen's Persuasion; Charlotte Bronte's The Professor; Edward Bulwer-Lytton, The Coming Race; Wilkie Collins, Heart and Science; Dickens's "Mudfog Papers" and Pickwick Papers; George Eliot's Middlemarch; Gaskell's "Cousin Phyllis" and Wives and Daughters; and Anthony Trollope's Dr. Thorne. Students will also read excerpts from scientific texts by Charles Darwin, Francis Galton, and Thomas Huxley, and study the engineering achievements of George Stephenson, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, and Joseph Paxton; and give reports on literary criticism and history of science.
English
231 - The Nineteenth-Century English Novel (undergraduate)Why the fascination today with nineteenth-century culture? From Merchant/Ivory films to Masterpiece Theater, from Jane Austen as Hollywood's hottest property to Charles Dickens Christmas celebrations, from A. S. Byatt's neo-Victorian novels to underwear from Victoria's Secret--nostalgic trips back to the prior century are a major growth industry in the 1990s.
In this course we read six important nineteenth-century novels against the backdrop of today's revival of "Victoriana." Films, hypertext fictions, web-based research sites, and cultural studies articles were used to set the contemporary context for the literature of the prior century. Today's popular misappropriations of the past have much to teach us--both about the real nature of the nineteenth century and about ourselves.
English
231 - The Nineteenth-Century English Novel (undergraduate)An earlier version of the above with different readings.
English
318 -The Victorian Novel, 1851-1867: Exhibitionism to Reform (graduate
seminarThe years from the Great Exhibition (1851) to the Second Reform Bill (1867) were a period of enormous vitality in the English novel. Major works by Dickens, Thackeray, Charlotte Bronte, Trollope, George Eliot, Gaskell, and others capitalized on the burgeoning of serial publication and circulating libraries; on unprecedented growth of consumer capitalism at home and imperial dominance abroad; on worshipful audiences ranging from distinguished literary critics, to eminent leaders of society and politics, to vast numbers of middle and lower class readers. The result was a novel of confident power and narrative scope. By focusing on this period, we are able to survey many of the major authors of Victorian fiction while attending closely to a specific set of historical developments, class relations, and gender issues.
| Jay Clayton |
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