Historical Research Lecture 2024 | Novel History

The 2024 Historical Research lecture will be given by Carolyn Steedman FBA (Emeritus Professor, Department of History at Warwick University).

I want to talk about the nature of historical writing, the many ways there are of `writing history’, and how to understand the 45 novels Stanley Middleton published between 1958 and 2010 as a history of daily living in Nottingham in the second half of the twentieth century. Middleton used the visual, violence, dialect, language, things and politics as historical forms–and all the historians in his novel–as historical gauges, placing action and people in certain historical settings. I hope to show you Middleton as a historian;–see him as ‘the historian’, a character his writing embodies. Perhaps you will become as obsessed as Middleton was with finding ways to place his characters and the lives they lived within particular historical bounds. Or perhaps by the end, you too will have become as obsessed as I am with just how telling the make of a vacuum is in his writing, or what a piece of toast and Marmite, or a jug kettle, or an electric blanket has to say about the social world and the histories that get written about it.

The lecture is sponsored by Oxford University Press.