Genres of Science Writing in the Nineteenth Century
Level/Semester taught: MA module, taught in semester 2
Convenor/Teacher: Adelene Buckland, adelene.buckland@kcl.ac.uk.
Assessment: 1 x 4000 word essay
Teaching pattern: 1 x 2hr seminar weekly
Pre-requisites: N/A
Module Outline
The nineteenth century saw unprecedented exploration of the natural worlds both at home and
abroad, and unprecedented debate about the nature of gender and sexuality in both human and
animal species. This course explores these two issues in tandem: what was the 'nature' of
Victorian sexuality, and how did encounters with new animal species, new human cultures, and
new scientific methods for exploring and analysing emotions and relations, produce or
complicate the Victorian vision of gender with which we are all familiar? How did explorers and
naturalists examine, ignore, or extend views on gender and sexuality? How did writers adapt,
respond to, or critique that vision? And what kinds of writing emerged from this new literature
of scientific exploration? Valuing scientific writing for its imaginative and aesthetic properties as
literature, and considering the role of the literary in shaping scientific endeavour, this course
will ask students to consider the ways in which formal, representational and generic choices - as
well as scientific modes of thought - may have been crucial to the work of imagining the world
and its species and the ways in which they interconnect.
Lecture/seminar programme
1. Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (1735)
2. James Cook, A Voyage to the Pacific Ocean (1768-1771; extracts); Robert Louis Stevenson,
‘The bottle imp’
3. Alexander von Humboldt, Personal Narrative (1819-29; extracts)
4. Charles Darwin, Journal of Researches (1839)
5. Richard Burton, Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to El Medinah and Mecca (1857) and
extracts from Isabelle Eberhardt, The Nomad: the Diaries of Isabelle Eberhardt (first pub.
2002).
6. George Bennett, Gatherings of a Naturalist in Australia (1860); Mary Beaumont, ‘The
Revenge of Her Race’ (1895)
7. Alfred Russel Wallace, The Malay Archipelago (1869) and Joseph Conrad, ‘The Lagoon’
(1897)
8. Marianne North, Recollections of a Happy Life (1892) - including a visit to the Marianne
North Gallery at Kew Gardens
9. Mary Kingsley, Travels in West Africa (1897)
10. H.G. Wells, The Island of Dr Moreau (1896)
Indicative further reading list
Agarwaal, Arun, ‘Dismantling the divide between indigenous and scientific knowledge’,
Development and Change 26 (1995), p. 413-439
Alam A., ‘Imperialism and science’ in Race and Class 19 (1978), pp. 239-251
Arnold, D. (ed.), Imperial Medicine and Indigenous Society (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1989)
Benjamin, Marina (ed.), Science and Sensibility: Gender and Scientific Inquiry 1780-1945
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991)
Bravo M., ‘Precision and curiosity in scientific travel’, in Elsner J. and Rubies J. (eds.) Voyages
and Visions: Towards a Cultural History of Travel (London, 1998)
Burnett, D.G., Masters of All they Surveyed: Exploration, Geography, and a British El Dorado
(Chicago, 2000)
Bullough, Vern and Bonnie Bullough, Cross Dressing, Sex and Gender (Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylvania Press, 1993)
Chiland, Collette, Transsexualism: Illusion and Reality (London: Continuum, 2003)
Daunton, Martin J. (ed.), Empire and Others: British Encounters with Indigenous Peoples,
1600-1850 (London: UCL Press, 1999)
DeVine, Christine (ed.), Nineteenth-Century British Travelers in the New World (Ashgate,
21013)
DiLeonardo, Michaela, ‘Introduction: gender, culture and political economy: feminist
anthropology in historical perspective’, in Gender at the Crossroads of Knowledge: Feminist
Anthropology in the Postmodern Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991)
Duncan, J. and Gregory D. (ed.), Writes of Passage: Reading Travel Writing (London, 1999)
Fausto-Sterling, Anne, Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality
(London: Basic Books, 2001)
Foucault, Michel, The History of Sexuality, 3 vols (London: Penguin, 1990)
Gates, Barbara and Ann Shteir, Natural Eloquence: Women Reinscribe Science (Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1997)
Haraway, Donna, Primate Visions: Gender, Race and Nature in the World of Modern Science
(Routledge, 1989)
Harraway, Donna, Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (London:
Routledge, 1991)
Hyam, R., Empire and Sexuality: The British Experience (Manchester, 1992)
Franey, Laura E., Victorian Travel Writing and Imperial Violence: BRitish Writing on Afric,
1855-1902(London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003)
Ghose, Indira, Women Travellers in Colonial India: The Power of the Female Gaze (New Delhi
and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000)
Grove, R., Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens, and the Origins of
Environmentalism, 1600-1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995)
Lacqueur, Thomas, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1990)
Lamb, Jonathan, Preserving the Self in the South Seas, 1680-1840 (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2001)
Leask, Nigel, Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel Writing, 1770-1840: “From an Antique
Land” (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002)
Lewis, Reina, Rethinking Orientalism: Women, travel and the Ottoman Harem (New
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004)
Liebersohn, Harry, The Travelers World: Europe to the Pacific (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2006)
Mackenzie J.M. (ed.), Imperialism and the Natural World (Manchester, 1990)
Midgley, Mary, Animals and Why they Matter (University of Georgia Press, 1998)
Morgan, Susan, Place Matters: Gendered Geography in Victorian Women’s Travel Books
About Southeast Asia (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996)
Miller, P. and Reill P.H. (eds.), Visions of Empire: Voyages, Botany, and Representations of
Nature (Cambridge, 1996)
Nash, Geoffrey, From Empire to Orient: Travellers to the Middle East, 1830-1926 (London:
Tauris, 205)
Nussbaum, Felicity, Torrid Zones: Maternity, Sexuality, and Empire in Eighteenth-Century
English Narratives (John Hopkins, 1995)
Ortner, Sherry (1974) 'Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture?' in Michelle Rosaldo and
Louise Lamphere (eds.) Woman, Culture and Society. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 6787
Palladino P. and Worboys M., ‘Science and imperialism’ in Isis 84 (1993), pp. 91-102
Poovey, Mary, Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian
England (London: Virago, 1989).
Pratt, Mary Louise, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London, 1992)
Riffenburgh B., The Myth of the Explorer: The Press, Sensationalism and Geographical
Discovery (London: Belhaven Press, 1993)
Ritvo, Harriet, The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age
(Harvard University Pres, 1987)
Russett, Cynthia, Sexual Science: Victorian Construction of Womanhood (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1991)
Said, Edmund, Culture and Imperialism (London, 1993)
Salmond, Anne, Between Worlds: Early Exchanges between Maori and Europeans, 1773-18
(Auckland: Penguin, 1999)
Schiebinger, Londa, Nature’s Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science (New Brunswick:
Rutgers University Press, 2nd edn. 2004)
Sivasundaram, Sujit, Nature and the Godly Empire: Science and Evangelical Mission in the
Pacific, 1795-1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005)
Smith, Vanessa, Literary Culture and the Pacific: Nineteenth-Century Textual Encounters
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998)
Stocking, George W., Victorian Anthropology (London; New York: Free Press, 1987)
Stoller, Robert, Presentations of Gender (New York: Yale University Press, 1985)
Yeazell, Ruth Bernard, Harems of the Mind (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 2000)