LEAH PRICE will offer a seminar on literature and communications in nineteenth-century Britain. The seminar will pair literary works that represent new communications technologies (a short story narrated by a telegraph operator; a play about thought-transference; a poem about communication between the living and the dead; novels about rail networks, spy networks, and news-gathering) with literary works that draw upon the form of those technologies (an epistolary novel; a poem in the guise of an intercepted correspondence; a romance presented as a collage of newspaper clippings, telegrams, and phonograph records).

Long before our own information superhighway, the Victorians invented their own techniques for transmitting knowledge, as well as new forms of literature designed to make sense of them. The development of the modern postal system and the first mass-circulation newspapers changed understandings of what it meant to write and read; so did new material infrastructures (railways, roads) and new inventions (photography, phonography, telegraphy) as well as lower-tech communication systems such as shorthand, spiritualism, and, above all, literature itself. The Victorians invested realist fiction – even more than the telegraph or the letter – with the power to grant readers access to other minds, but the same techniques that enabled identification also raised questions about the boundaries of the self. What do new methods of storing and retrieving information do to the relation between memory and identity, words and bodies, speech and writing? How far is it possible to know what's going on in another person's head, in a literary character's, in one's own? Does communication at a distance generate sympathy or simply facilitate blackmail? What becomes of the author once texts can be produced by machines?

In the seminar, we'll read a range of genres – dramatic monologues, imaginary correspondences, realist novels, ghost stories, science fiction, political polemics, literary criticism, by Thomas de Quincey, Maria Edgeworth, John Stuart Mill, Robert Browning, A.H. Clough, Henry James, George Du Maurier, Robert Louis Stevenson, Bram Stoker, Rudyard Kipling, and Thomas Hardy – to explore Victorian hopes and fears for the information age. Along the way the seminar will provide a hands-on introduction to Harvard's libraries, using electronic resources as well as the most enduring communications technology of all – books.