Disciplinary Cultures: Negotiating the Boundaries of Literature and Science, 1815-1859

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

The book I will complete during the application period is a new account of the relations between literature and science in Britain from the Regency to 1859, the year of Origin of Species. For the past two decades or more, Romantic and Victorian studies have been increasingly interested in the relationship between literature and science. Recent collections of primary sources such as Tim Fulford's five-volume Science and Romanticism (Routledge, 2002), Laura Otis's Literature and Science in the Nineteenth Century (OUP, 2002) and A. S Weber's Nineteenth-Century Science: An Anthology (Broadview, 2000) make a variety of scientific writing available to a literary audience. Path-breaking scholarly work such as that of Gillian Beer, George Levine and Sally Shuttleworth in the 1980s has been continued by those scholars and (in the UK) by Elinor Shaffer, Tim Fulford, Gowan Dawson and many others, giving a much more detailed picture of the interactions between scientific and literary writers, readers, ideas and terminology through the period. This work has established that nineteenth-century literature and science must be recognised as mutually interpenetrating. But there are areas of nineteenth-century science's relationship with culture about which we still need to know more. Scholars in this field are concerned with the processes and mechanisms by which the work of scientists and literary writers became known to members of the other discipline. Existing scholarship has shown that it is not easy to determine clear and stable demarcations between what counted as literature and what as science in the early decades of the nineteenth century. One key area for research, then, is to develop an account of the various discussions in the period about where the emerging boundary lines between the different disciplinary practices, languages, and public activities of literary and scientific work should be drawn. The content, conduct and conclusions of these discussions varied widely depending on the historical moment at which they took place, the individuals, institutions and media involved, and the state of the sub-disciplines under discussion. The narrative of my book is not one of progress towards a version of the 'Two Cultures' model with clear boundaries between literature and science; instead I want to show how complicated, interwoven and contentious the development of distinct disciplinary identities was. My book tests and extends our current view of the interdisciplinary culture of nineteenth-century Britain through a series of studies of hard cases: places and occasions in which the boundaries between literature and science were attacked, challenged, broached or defended. I outline my selection of chapters in the attached Case for Support; briefly, my project is to investigate the fraught and ragged emergence of mutually-defining literary and scientific practices through examples of three repositories of cultural authority: the institution, the individual and the discipline. While recent important studies of early nineteenth-century literature and science have focused on other means of investigation, especially publication methods (for instance, the excellent collection edited by Jon Topham et al, Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical (CUP 2004)), I have chosen an approach which allows me to draw connections and comparisons between activities taking place in a wide range of genres and environments, from university curricula to reviews and from metropolitan lectures to realist novels. My book will show show that the dynamic negotiation between 'literature' and 'science' in this period was fundamental to the development of Victorian self-consciousness about the nature and virtue of culture.The book builds on my previous monograph, Space and the 'March of Mind': Literature and the Physical Sciences in Britain, 1815-1850, and also develops work I have presented as conference papers over the last three years.