ID Marginalities: Marginalities in Nineteenth-Century European Culture
Course Convenor: Dr Charlotte Lee (cew47@cam.ac.uk), German Section
This module is the Faculty’s main route for route for students interested in any aspect of the long nineteenth century (1789-1914). Beyond its remit as a Lent Term module, it also helps students shape plans for Easter Term dissertations on nineteenth-century material and for subsequent PhD projects. The seminars will take a range of approaches to the question of writing at and about the margins of society and culture in the nineteenth century. Our key term, ‘marginalities’, will be examined through the prism of gender, sexuality, class, ethnicity, and indeed of the intersections between categories. Topics for discussion will include processes of empowerment and disempowerment; the nineteenth-century fascination with ‘transgression’; questions of national community and belonging; and the insights which might be born of a position of marginality. Individual sessions will be introduced by members of different Sections, but will be organized thematically, with a view to opening up comparisons with corresponding material in other areas.
The reading list below is intended to give a taste of some of the directions in which this topic could be taken. But the leaders of each individual seminar will recommend material tailored to their particular area. English translations of foreign-language material will be used, but students will be encouraged to use original material in those languages they know. There is a rich research base in Cambridge on 19th century European culture, and we would normally expect to offer seminars based on material from France, Germany, Italy, Russia & Spain. A variety of theoretical approaches will be set out, often working at the junction of literary studies and cultural history. Students wishing to work on other areas should contact the convenor at an early stage to explore how their interests can be catered for in the module.
There will normally be a maximum capacity of 14 for this module.
Preliminary reading:
Berger, Stefan (ed.). A Companion to Nineteenth-Century Europe, 1789-1914 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006)
Bunyan, Anita, ‘Jews for Germany: Nineteenth-Century Jewish-German Intellectuals and the Shaping of German National Discourse’, in Nationalism Before the Nation State: Literary Constructions of Inclusion, Exclusion and Self-Definition, ed. by Dagmar Paulus and Ellen Pilsworth (Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2020), pp. 99-120.
Gallagher, Catherine, and Laqueur, Thomas, Making of the Modern Body: Sexuality and Society in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987)
Kalifa, Dominique. Vice, Crime, and Poverty: How the Western Imagination Invented the Underworld, trans. Susan Emanuel (New York: Columbia University Press, 2021)
Mesch, Rachel. Before Trans: Three Gender Stories From Nineteenth-Century France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2020)
Nordau, Max, Degeneration, translated and with an introduction by George L. Mosse (Lincoln & London: University of Nebraska Press, 1993)
Parush, Iris, Reading Jewish Women: Marginality and Modernization in Nineteenth-Century Eastern European Jewish Society (Waltham, Mass.: University Press of New England, 2004)
Sanson, Helena, ‘Women and Language Codification in Italy: Marginalized Voices, Forgotten Contributions’, in Women and the History of Linguistics, ed. by Wendy Bennett and Helena Sanson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), pp. 59-90.
Tsuchiya, Akiko, Marginal Subjects: Gender and Deviance in Nineteenth-Century Spain (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017).
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