It can be said that late-18th C British culture confirmed its creative powers in mutuality with nature, and that it set those powers to work in the commerce, industry, and citybuilding that threatened nature and the human sense of connection to it. The course begins with the Enlightenment thought of Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations and the commercial/industrial/city build-up of the late 18th C. We will consider further developments in political economy in this period through a report on Thomas Malthus's Essay on the Principle of Population. A report on Edmund Burke's On the Sublime and Beautiful in nature prepares the way from the 18th C. to Romanticism. We then read selections from William Wordsworth's The Prelude for depictions of Romantic relations to nature and the city. Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus marks a Romantic-Victorian transition. Creativity as imaginative response to nature becomes a work ethic of productivity—in industry, commerce, and city-building. Following a report on Carlyle's "Captains of Industry" comes Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South. This sets the north of industry, commerce, and city in contrast to the south of the country, and we will also look at the gendering of this difference. We will consider selections from Charles Darwin's Origin of Species and Darwin's debt to Malthus for the germ of "natural selection." Here ideas of nature and economics converge. We see different responses of disquiet in short selections from Alfred Lord Tennyson's "In Memoriam," John Ruskin's "The Nature of Gothic" (by report), short poems (in handouts or by e-reserves) by Matthew Arnold, and selections (by report) from Culture and Anarchy and "The Study of Poetry." The course culminates with Our Mutual Friend, Charles Dickens's great novel of the city as nature, a place of pollution and recycling, predation and mutuality, destruction, production, and creation. As time allows, we will sample George Gissing's In the Year of Jubilee for mixed attitudes towards nature, city, commerce, and industry at the end of the Victorian period.
Tracing developments across Enlightenment, Romantic, and Victorian writings often studied separately, the course emphasizes primary texts and correlations between them. Historical "briefs" will provide historical context, and Raymond Williams's The Country and the City offers critical guidance, along with historical perspective. We will take note of recent critical interests in economics and literature and in ecocriticism—for instance, work by Jonathan Bate, Catherine Gallagher, Karl Kroeber, Andrew Miller, Nicholas Roe, and Mary Poovey. Such critical interests, too, are often pursued separately, but combine here.
The course can serve students in different ways: as introduction and overview for new students or those seeking a secondary period-field; as opportunity for period-field consolidation for those with a primary interest; as context and background for those interested in economic and ecological approaches, though not specializing in Enlightenment/Romantic/Victorian Studies.
Requirements: On-going seminar contribution, including a report (@15 min.), a historical brief (5-10 min.), and leading discussion of a primary text (25%--and for each of these please provide a 1-p. handout); a response paper on a single text or set of short texts (7-8 pp) (25%); a longer paper ideally building on the shorter one, more synthesizing and treating at least 2 authors (@12-15) (50%).