Reading Pack
General Reading
Beer, Gillian, ‘Translation or Transformation? The Relations of Literature and Science’, Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 173–95.
Dawson, Gowan, ‘Literature and Science under the Microscope’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 11 (2006), 301–15.
John, Carey, ‘Introduction’, The Faber Book of Science, ed. John Carey (London: Faber, 1995), pp. xiii–xxvii.
Ralph, O’Connor, ‘Introduction: Science as Literature’, The Earth on Show: Fossils and the Poetics of Popular Science, 1802–1856 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2007, pp. 1–27.
Ruston, Sharon, ‘Introduction’, in 'Literature and Science' Essays and Studies, 61 (2008), 1–12
Reading
Plenary Session 1: ‘Empiricism and the Novel’
Session 1: Gladstone Library Collection
Session 2: Mono-, Inter-, Multi- disciplinarity
Session 4: Medical Discoveries and Online Resources
Plenary Lecture 2: ‘Researching Early Twentieth-Century Literature and the Physical Sciences
Session 6: Literature and Science session
Session 7: Psychoanalysis, Medicine and Social Pathology
Session 8: Evolution without Darwin
Plenary Session 1: ‘Empiricism and the Novel’
Sprat, Thomas, History of the Royal Society (1667) [Full view available on google books]
Swift, Jonathan, ‘The Battle of the Books’ (1704)
Swift, Jonathan, Gulliver’s Travels (1727)
The Spectator (1711):Original Dedication; No. 1 Thursday, March 1, 1711 Addison
de Montaigne, Michel, ‘Of Cannibals’ (1580)
Levi, Primo, ‘Iron’ (from The Periodic Table, 1975/1985)
Session 1: Gladstone Library Collection
Ruth Clayton Windscheffel, Gladstone Reading (Palgrave, 2008)
Ruth Clayton Windscheffel, ‘W. E. Gladstone: an annotation key’, Notes & 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
Collini, Stefan, ‘Introduction’, C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. vii–lxxi.
Moran, Joe, ‘Science, Space and Nature’, Interdisciplinarity, New Critical Idiom (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 148–81. [Limited preview on google books]
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.
William Harvey, On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals Dedications, Letter to Prince Charles, Introduction, and Chapters 8 & 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
The introduction of anaesthesia (late 1840s)
Undertake some brief searches on the introduction of anaesthesia in the online journals/newspapers listed below. Use the search terms: anaesthesia, ether, 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’
Beer, Gillian, ‘Translation or Transformation? The Relations of Literature and Science’, Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 173–95.
Brisbane, Coutts, ‘For the Good of Creation’, Yellow Magazine, XIX: 120 (16 April 1926).
Laqui, M. A., ‘Death-Rays and Moonshine: Is there a Menace’, Conquest, V: 9 (July 1924), pp. 382–83.
Session 6: Literature and Science session
Beer, Gillian, ‘Introduction: The Remnant of the Mythical’, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 3–11.
Beer, Gillian, ‘Translation or Transformation? The Relations of Literature and Science’, Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 173–95.
Dawson, Gowan, ‘Literature and Science under the Microscope’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 11 (2006), 301–15.
Levine, George, ‘One Culture: Science and Literature’, in One Culture: Essays in Science and Literature, ed. by George Levine and Alan Rausch (University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), pp. 3–32.
Ruston, Sharon, ‘Introduction’, ‘Literature and Science’, 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): vii-xi (Introduction) and 4-25 (‘The Strange Case of “Anna O.”: An Overview of the “Revisionist” Assessment’) [limited preview on google books]
Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921)
Elisabeth Roudinesco, Why Psychoanalysis?, trans. Rachel Bowlby (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001): 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
Smith, Jonathan, ‘Darwin and the Evolution of Victorian Studies’, Victorian Studies, 51: 2 (Winter 2009), 215–21.
Bowler, Peter J., ‘What Darwin Disturbed: The Biology That Might Have Been’, Isis, 99 (2008), 560–67.
Endersby, Jim, ‘Escaping Darwin’s Shadow’, Journal of the History of Biology, 36 (2003), 385–403.
Dixon, Edmund S, ‘A Vision of Animal Existences’, Cornhill Magazine, 5 (1862), pp. 311–18.
Kingsley, Charles, Alton Locke (1850), chapter 36 (‘Dreamland’) [Available in google books]
Secord, James, 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. [Limited view available on google books]
Session 9: Literary Darwinism
Amigoni, David, ‘A Consilient Canon? Bridges to and from Evolutionary Literary Analysis’, review article (5000 words), English Studies in Canada, 32: 2–3 (June/September 2006), 173–85.
Amigoni, David, ‘“The luxury of storytelling”: literature, science and cultural contest in the narrative practice of Ian McEwan’ in ‘Science and Literature’, Essays and Studies, ed. Sharon Ruston, 61 (2008), 151–67.
Gottschall, Jonathan, and David Sloan Wilson, ‘Introduction: Literature — A Last Frontier in Human Evolutionary Studies’, The Literary Animal: Evolution and the Nature of Narrative (Northwestern University Press, 2005), pp. xvii–xxvi. [Limited preview on google books]
