‘Literature “between natural history and history”’

by Prof Edward Hughes (Queen Mary, University of London)

Wednesday 7 May, 3pm to 4.30pm

Yudowitz Room, Wolfson Building

Followed by a drinks reception in the Atrium.

The lecture will explore ways in which the writers Jules Michelet, Tolstoy and W.G. Sebald engage with history and also seek to dislodge its human-centredness. In the later part of his prolific career, Michelet turned from ‘history’ to something approaching natural history. He refers to the study of nature as an antidote to the painful record of human doing, writing in L’Insecte of ‘le drame du monde et l’épopée éternelle’. In the Epilogue of War and Peace, Tolstoy asks how we are to understand turbulent history, his protest being that many of its strands must remain unknown. In The Rings of Saturn, Sebald writes of natural history charting ‘the endless destruction wrought in the cycle of life’ (p. 57), the author using this as a foil for the representation of calamitous destruction in human history.

The voices of insistence audible in these authors’ works frequently channel questions of scale and multiplication and put forward narratives of alternative worlds and understanding.

Prof Edward Hughes is Emeritus Professor of French at Queen Mary, University of London. He is the author of Egalitarian Strangeness: On Class Disturbance and Levelling in Modern and Contemporary French Narrative (2021), Writing Marginality in Modern French Literature: from Loti to Genet (2001), and landmark studies of Marcel Proust and Albert Camus.