Event 1
General Reading
Gillian Beer, ‘Translation or Transformation? The Relations of Literature and Science’, in Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 173-95
John Carey, ‘Introduction’, in The Faber Book of Science, ed. by John Carey (London: Faber, 1995), pp. xiii-xxvii
Gowan Dawson, ‘Literature and Science Under the Microscope’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 11 (2006), 301-15
Ralph O’Connor, ‘Introduction: Science as Literature’, in The Earth on Show: Fossils and the Poetics of Popular Science, 1802-1856 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), pp. 1-27
Sharon Ruston, ‘Introduction’, ‘Science and Literature’, Essays and Studies, 61 (2008), 1-12
Plenary Session 1: ‘Empiricism and the Novel’
Michel De Montaigne, ‘Of Cannibals’ (1580)
Primo Levi, ‘Iron’ (from The Periodic Table (1975/85))
Original Dedication, The Spectator, 1 (1 March 1711)
Thomas Sprat, History of the Royal Society (1667)
Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (1727)
Jonathan Swift, The Battle of the Books (1704)
Session 1: Gladstone Library Collection
Ruth Clayton Windscheffel, Gladstone Reading (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008)
Ruth Clayton Windscheffel, ‘W. E. Gladstone: An Annotation Key’, Notes and Queries, 246 (new series 48), n. 2 (June 2001), 140-43
W. E. Gladstone, ‘On Books and the Housing of Them’, Nineteenth Century, 27 (March 1890), 384-96
Session 2: Mono-, Inter-, Multi- Disciplinarity
Stefan Collini, ‘Introduction’, in C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. vii-lxxi
Joe Moran, ‘Science, Space and Nature’, in Interdisciplinarity (New Critical Idiom) (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 148-81
Session 4: Medical Discoveries and Online Resources
Outline
New theories, techniques, and drugs are a fundamental strand of the history of medicine and provide fertile ground for researching a multiplicity of themes and ideas. But we have to take great care not to interpret past discoveries in present-centred terms. Medical innovations are shaped by specific historical and cultural conditions, and critical analysis of the wider context surrounding their discovery is a key part of historical research. The aim of this session is to introduce students to the pleasures and pitfalls of researching medical discoveries through two examples: William Harvey and the circulation of the blood (1643) and the introduction of anaesthesia (late 1840s). Additionally we will explore the potential of online resources for research in this area.
Content
It will be helpful if you have prepared in advance for the session as outlined below.
- Read William Harvey, On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals: Dedications, Letter to Prince Charles, Introduction, and Chapters 8 and 9. This material can be downloaded from Bartleby.com or from The Modern History Source Book.
Use the following questions to structure your reading:
- What was the ‘old’ view, which Harvey came to deny?
- What led him to his new view?
- How was this view supported and communicated to the world?
- Was Harvey a revolutionary?
- Undertake some brief searches on the introduction of anaesthesia in the online journals/newspapers listed below. Use the search terms: ‘anaesthesia’, ‘ether’, and ‘chloroform’, and search between 1846 and 1860.
The Guardian and Observer newspapers
The Lancet (1832 to present)
Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical Index
Plenary Lecture 2: ‘Researching Early Twentieth-Century Literature and the Physical Sciences’
Gillian Beer, ‘Translation or Transformation? The Relations of Literature and Science’, in Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 173-95
Coutts Brisbane, ‘For the Good of Creation’, Yellow Magazine, 19:120 (16 April 1926)
M. A. Laqui, ‘Death-Rays and Moonshine: Is There a Menace’, Conquest, 5:9 (July 1924), 382-83
Session 6: Literature and Science
Gillian Beer, ‘Introduction: The Remnant of the Mythical’, in Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 3-11
Gillian Beer, ‘Translation or Transformation? The Relations of Literature and Science’, in Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 173-95
Gowan Dawson, ‘Literature and Science Under the Microscope’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 11 (2006), 301-15
George Levine, ‘One Culture: Science and Literature’, in One Culture: Essays in Science and Literature, ed. by George Levine and Alan Rausch (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), pp. 3-32
Sharon Ruston, ‘Introduction’, ‘Science and Literature’, Essays and Studies, 61 (2008), 1-12
Session 7: Psychoanalysis, Medicine, and Social Pathology
This session will focus primarily on Freud’s thought on hypnosis and suggestion, and their postulated role in group formations. These ideas will be contextualised and assessed through a discussion of H. G. Wells’s The Island of Dr Moreau and, more widely, in relation to recent debates about the therapeutic efficacy and social impact of psychoanalysis.
Todd Dufresne, Killing Freud: Twentieth-Century Culture and the Death of Psychoanalysis (London and New York: Continuum, 2003), pp. vii-xi (Introduction) and 4-25 (‘The Strange Case of “Anna O.”: An Overview of the “Revisionist” Assessment’)
Sigmund Freud, ‘Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego’ (1921)
Elisabeth Roudinesco, Why Psychoanalysis?, trans. by Rachel Bowlby (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), pp. 10-19 (‘The Medications of the Mind’) and 41-55 (‘Frankenstein’s Brain’)
H. G. Wells, The Island of Dr Moreau (1896)
Session 8: Evolution Without Darwin
Jonathan Smith, ‘Darwin and the Evolution of Victorian Studies’, Victorian Studies, 51:2 (2009), 215-21
Peter J. Bowler, ‘What Darwin Disturbed: The Biology That Might Have Been’, Isis, 99 (2008), 560-67
Jim Endersby, ‘Escaping Darwin’s Shadow’, Journal of the History of Biology, 36 (2003), 385-403
Edmund S. Dixon, ‘A Vision of Animal Existences’, Cornhill Magazine, 5 (1862), 311-18
Charles Kingsley, Alton Locke (1850), Chapter 36 (‘Dreamland’)
James Secord, Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), pp. 4-5, 479-518
Session 9: Literary Darwinism
David Amigoni, ‘A Consilient Canon? Bridges To and From Evolutionary Literary Analysis’, English Studies in Canada, 32:2/3 (2006), 173-85
David Amigoni, ‘“The Luxury of Storytelling”: Literature, Science and Cultural Contest in the Narrative Practice of Ian McEwan’, ‘Science and Literature’, Essays and Studies, 61 (2008), 151-67
Jonathan Gottschall and David Sloan Wilson, ‘Introduction: Literature – A Last Frontier in Human Evolutionary Studies’, in The Literary Animal: Evolution and the Nature of Narrative (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2005), pp. xvii-xxvi