Raymond Stephanson and Darren N. Wagner discuss their interdisciplinary examination of the many aspects of reproduction in the eighteenth century – The Secrets of Generation: Reproduction in the Long Eighteenth Century
How did you become involved in your area of research?
RAS: In the early 1990s I began researching and writing a book about the famous 18th-century poet Alexander Pope and the ways male creativity was then understood. It became clear to me that a key cultural touchstone for this were reproductive metaphors. Many years later—2004, to be exact—the University of Pennsylvania Press published my The Yard of Wit: Male Creativity and Sexuality, 1650–1750.
DNW: My early academic background is split between biological sciences and English literature. In 2007 I began an interdisciplinary master’s degree program in 18th-century literature and reproductive biology under the co-supervision of Prof. Stephanson and Prof. Roger Pierson. My specialty in sex and reproduction in the 18th century was forged then, and I have been researching various aspects of this topic since.
What inspired you to write this book?
RAS: Having published on 18th-century sex, gender, and reproduction, it was apparent to me and my co-editor Dr. Wagner that such a collection was sorely needed for such an important historical topic.
How long did it take you to write your latest book?
DNW: Prof. Stephanson and I first discussed this project in 2011 at a Canadian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies meeting hosted by McMaster University. Four years and a couple thousand emails later, The Secrets of Generation has hit the shelves.
What do you find most interesting about your area of research?
RAS: Its diversity and surprising range of application across material and cultural domains: humans, animals, plants, species, heredity, selective breeding, literary expression, scandal and gossip, pornography—all of these include some aspect of reproduction, from theory to praxis to money-making.
What’s the most surprising thing you discovered during the course of your research?
RAS: Mainly in talking to others—mostly colleagues—about the work we were putting together, how narrow most peoples’ attitudes were to the subject “reproduction.” My pals always only think about human sex stuff and never about animals, plants, history, and all those other cool things!
DNW: For my chapter on anatomical displays of male genitalia, I had a small grant from the Scientific Instrument Society to spend some time researching at the Hunterian Museum, London. It’s an impressive museum based upon John Hunter’s anatomical collection from the 18th century. If you’re ever in the neighbourhood, stopping in for a peak is a must!
What are your current/future projects?
RAS: Right now I am working on a book that attempts to trace the emergence of science fiction around the middle of the 18th century. Literary historians usually mark Frankenstein as the first of this new breed, but I think we can look at the interesting ways in which, taken together, scientific writing including fictional elements and literary narratives deploying new science and technology opened a historical space for initial experiments with a fictional science.
DNW: I am currently writing a book with the working title of Sexual Feeling: Sensibility and Generation in Enlightenment Britain. This book explores physiological theories that connected nerves and sex in the long 18th century. A central question in this book is how these theories are expressed in and communicated between literature, philosophy, medicine, science and technology.
What do you like to read for pleasure? What are you currently reading?
RAS: Reading pleasures have always been the stuff I’m currently researching, and right now I am keenly reading 17th– and 18th-century botanical treatises, filled as they are with all manner of cultural baggage. Very exciting to me, and likely boring to others!
DNW: I generally enjoy picaresque novels, such as Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders, Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, or Rudyard Kipling’s Kim. Currently I am preparing for an exhibition I am co-curating at the Osler Library for the History of Medicine by reading medical books from the 16th to 19th century about blood.
What is your favourite book?
RAS: Laurence Sterne’s 18th-century novel, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, and many of the short stories by Charles Bukowski.
DNW: The Diary of a Nobody by George and Weedon Grossmith is one of my all-time comedic favourites.
If you weren’t working in academia, what would you be doing instead?
RAS: Playing jazz piano in Vancouver nightclubs.
DNW: As a postdoctoral fellow with no certain employment in sight, that’s a question I am always asking myself. Probably I’d have a career that’s much less interesting and much better paid. Perhaps I’d still be working on the cucumber farm I grew up on. People need their dill pickles.
