This module is not currently running in 2024 to 2025.
This module puts together the methods of literature and history. Its case studies come from nineteenth-century science, as it is in this area of scholarship in which some of the most exciting and stimulating historicist scholarship has arisen of late. The first term will be spent on a review of various approaches to literature and history, from textual to contextual, taking in, for example, the narrative turn, reception theory and reader-centred studies. This will be partnered with a slow and in-depth reading of two nineteenth-century texts that have spawned most historicist scholarship in literature and science: most likely George Eliot’s Middlemarch and Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species (tbc). In the second term, students will choose a selection of novels (one per week) for study within the framework of methodologies covered in term 1. Students will be guided and advised in their choices, which are anticipated to lie in the realm of nineteenth or possibly twentieth-century science. Students will develop two of their chosen texts for independent research, assessed by means of substantial essays.
The module will be assessed by coursework and exam on a 40% coursework and 60% exam ratio.
The coursework component (12,000 words in total) will be assessed as follows:
1. 2 x 5000 word essays, each worth 50% of the coursework mark. These will be based on the texts selected by students in term 2, will thus represent significant achievements in self-directed research.
2. 1 x 1000 word critical summary of a contextual or contextual approach covered in term 1.
3. 5 x 200 word seminar interventions – these must be prepared for every seminar, and will be picked on at random for reading out and assessment. A seminar intervention is a brief note of comments based on assigned readings, expressing a cogent thought or opinion on the readings and intended to stimulate class discussion.
Exams
The module will also be tested in 2 x two–hour exams (equally weighted). These will be based on the work covered in term 1.
One exam will be based on gobbets from the two key primary texts (or closely-related intertexts)
The other exam will test evaluative knowledge of the textual/contextual approaches studied (i.e. literary-critical and historiographical).
• C.L. Sleigh. (2010) Literature and Science. London: Palgrave
• G. Beer. (2009) Darwin's plots: evolutionary narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and nineteenth-century fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• G. Cavallo & R. Chartier (eds.). (2003) A History of Reading in the West. London: Polity
• I. Crossman & S. Suleiman. (1980) The Reader in the Text: Essays on Audience and Interpretation. Princeton: Princeton University Press
• P. Davis. (2002) The Victorians. Oxford: Oxford University Press
• D. Finkelstein & A. McCleery. (2012) An introduction to book history. London: Routledge
• H. J. Jackson. (2001) Marginalia: Readers writing in books. New Haven: Yale University Press
• A. Manguel. (1997) The history of reading. London: Penguin
• G. Moore. (2012) The Victorian Novel in Context. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing
• A. Parejo-Vadillo et al (2011). Victorian literature: a sourcebook. London: Palgrave Macmillan
• J. A. Secord (2000) Victorian Sensation (Chicago)
• H. White. (2009) The content of the form: Narrative discourse and historical representation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press
See the library reading list for this module (Canterbury)
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