English 252 - Winter, 2015

Victorian Literature

Class Information

Instructor: Frederickson, Kathleen
CRN: 93574
Time: T 12:10-3:00
Location: 120 Voorhies
Breadth: Later British
Focus: Interdiscipline, Theory

Description

Novel Sciences in Nineteenth-Century Britain

This course will examine how the emergence of the disciplines in the sciences shaped the form of nineteen-century British fiction. By reading major Victorian novels by Dickens, Eliot, Hardy, and Wells alongside work by nineteenth-century scientists such as Darwin, Faraday, Joule, Kelvin, and Lyell, this course will ask about the relationships between, for instance, “deep time” and narrative structure; natural selection and novelistic setting; astronomy and character-system; thermodynamics and “motivation”; biology and the construction of both sexuality and scientific racism. In order to understand the theoretical and historical terms through which to understand these questions, we will also read key texts in Science and Technology Studies (Whitehead,,Latour, Stengers, Malabou) as well as literary critical work on science and Victorian fiction (Beer, Dames, Henchman, MacDuffie).