English 9221
Time and Life in Mid-Victorian Literature and Natural History
Instructor: Professor Matthew Rowlinson.
Winter Half Course.
This course will focus on three major mid-Victorian texts in different genres: Alfred Tennyson’s poetic elegy In Memoriam (1850); Charles Darwin’s treatise in natural history The Origin of Species (1859); and George Eliot’s historical novel Middlemarch (1870-71). All three works respond to two major scientific developments earlier in the century: the emergent consensus that the history of the earth is far longer than had previously been believed, and that in the course of this history many once-flourishing forms of life had become extinct. An effect of these discoveries was to decentre human history, which now became only a small part of the long history of life, and to pose the question of human extinction—if life existed on earth before there were human beings, it could presumably continue after their disappearance. In the broadest sense all three of these works respond to the displacement of theological and anthropocentric ideas of human life and history: the world and its living things were not made for humans, and its history is not principally shaped by them.
These works also confront problems of representation posed by the new science: how to represent processes that unfold in time frames too vast for human perception; how to understand the emergence of design without agency. Darwin addresses these problems—central to his theory of natural selection--by using tropes like analogy and personification; the literary texts stage problems of representation by allegorizing them in narratives of loss and diminished agency.
Besides our three central texts, we will also consider selections from writers who influenced them, such as Thomas Malthus, Charles Lyell, and William Paley. We will discuss important critical literature around our topic, notably the foundational work of Gillian Beer, and consider the new centering of the human in our own time with the emergence of concepts such as the anthropocene.
