EGL 306 - Jr. Seminar (Spring): Romanticism & Natural History

Course Units: 1

(Spring; Burkett) As a range of eminent scholars of Romantic and Victorian literature and science have argued, the imaginative literature and the evolutionary and geological sciences of the nineteenth century were intimately tied together in mutually reinforcing and constitutive patterns. In this course we will investigate long-form narratives of the nineteenth century, such as the Victorian novel and Romantic verse epic, in the context of a variety of natural philosophies and histories of this period. Students will be guided through selected readings in primary texts such as Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859), Sir Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology (1830-33), James Hutton’s Theory of the Earth (1795), and Robert Chambers’ Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844) alongside readings in imaginative literature such as George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1872), William Wordsworth’s epic poem The Excursion (1814), Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1892), Dorothy Wordsworth’s Grasmere journals, and Mary Shelley’s novel The Last Man (1826). This syllabus thereby places into dialectical conversation Romantic and Victorian imaginative literature with narratives of the geological and evolutionary sciences of the period. In addition to the primary sources in nineteenth-century natural history noted above, this course will also introduce students to a range of secondary texts in the field such as John McPhee’s Basin and Range (1980), Gillen D’Arcy Wood’s Tambora: The Eruption that Changed the World (2014), Andreas Malm’s Fossil Capital (2016), and Stephen Jay Gould’s Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time (1987). Students will write midterm and final research papers for this course, and attendance and course participation will be crucial in the determination of final course grades. Prerequisite(s): One 100-level and two 200-level English courses. CC: HUL, HUM