Teaching Civil War Writings

Symposium run by the English Subject Centre of the Higher Education Academy, with CREMS and the Department of English & Related Literature

Please note you must register in advance - Last Date for registration: 24 Feb 11
To register please complete the online form:
http://www.english.heacademy.ac.uk/explore/events/event_detail.php?event_index=297
or contact the Subject Centre:  esc@rhul.ac.uk
There is no charge, but the organisers reserve the right to charge a £15:00 non-attendance fee.

The English Subject Centre is part of the Higher Education Academy and supports the teaching of English Literature, English Language and Creative Writing across UK Higher Education.

Literature courses in the Renaissance and Restoration have long had trouble covering the period of the civil war, so obviously central to the events of the period, but equally so traumatic that it did not lend itself to the production of texts that have habitually made it into the English Canon. Traditionally, the period has been represented, or perhaps misrepresented by the ‘Cavalier Poets’ or Browne’s Religio Medici and, on the other side of the regicide and restoration, by Marvell and onto Milton, leaving a yawning gulf around the most important events of the era. Changes over recent decades in canon, methodology and political perspectives have altered the shape of English literature in many respects, but have not, in general, provided new possibilities for teaching the civil war. This free one-day will aim to explore how this might be changed. It will invite ideas on teaching texts that are not specifically ‘literary’ and ask what are the parameters of the literature class, what is the role of historical in literature when it is not, specifically, being deployed as ‘context’ to explicate texts and how do we help students use the writing of the period to think conceptually about the nature of literature and its relation to politics or religion. The event will consider problems of periodisation, thinking through continuities and disjunctions with the Restoration; the nature of disciplinary boundaries in the era - how, for example, should a central philosophical text like Hobbes’ Leviathan function in the literature class? – and the evident ruptures in terms of who wrote and published in the period, with its mushrooming of publications by women, its anti-authoritarian and radical texts and its changing formats of writing, in the emergence of pamphlet literature. The use of new social media in teaching the texts of the civil war will also be a key topic of the day.

The event is premised on the idea that research into the civil war over the past two decades or so has outstripped and fallen radically out of kilter with the literature class. Much excellent historiography and recuperation of texts (on for example women’s writing, leveller thought, pamphlet writing, drama of the civil war) has been produced over this period, but this has evidently not been accommodated into teaching, in part because of the non-canonical and occasionally non-accessible nature of this material, but more centrally, the session will presume, owing to a lack of a conceptual framework for teaching this material. The questions around this, which the event will address, may be aesthetic (in what sense are these texts worth teaching?), methodological (will such teaching be primarily history with a smattering of literary texts?), pedagogic (how will students respond to this material?) or may revolve around coherence (is the disparate nature of these texts, generically speaking, such that a coherent approach eludes the potential teacher?). We will consider a number of ways of enabling students to conceive of the era outside of comparative genre-based notions of literature – material objects and the literary text; apocalypse and literary style; the breakdown of censorship and the nature of dissent; war and genre – to circumvent what might be perceived as a lack of a strong central canon. We will also ask participants to ‘donate’ texts, in advance, which we hope to collate as a teaching resource for those attending the seminar.

Full details and programme

Contact: Dr Kevin Killeen, Department of English and Related Literature
kevin.killeen@york.ac.uk