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

我将在申请期间完成的这本书是对从摄政时期到1859年《物种起源》这一年英国文学与科学之间关系的一种新的叙述。在过去的二十多年里，浪漫主义和维多利亚研究对文学与科学之间的关系越来越感兴趣。最近收集的主要来源，如蒂姆富尔福德的五卷本科学和浪漫主义（弗里奇，2002年），劳拉奥蒂斯的文学和科学在十九世纪（牛津大学出版社，2002年）和A。S·韦伯的《十九世纪科学：选集》（Broadview，2000年）为文学读者提供了各种科学写作。20世纪80年代，吉莉安·比尔（Gillian Beer）、乔治·莱文（George Levine）和萨莉·沙特尔沃思（Sally Shuttleworth）等学者以及（在英国）埃莉诺·谢弗（Elinor Shaffer）、蒂姆·富尔福德（Tim Fulford）、高恩·道森（Gowan Dawson）和其他许多学者继续开展了开创性的学术工作，对这一时期科学和文学作家、读者、思想和术语之间的互动进行了更为详细的描述。这部著作确立了19世纪的文学和科学必须被认为是相互渗透的。但是，19世纪科学与文化的关系中有一些领域我们仍然需要更多地了解。这一领域的学者关注的是科学家和文学作家的作品被其他学科成员所知的过程和机制。现有的学术研究表明，在世纪的最初几十年里，要在什么是文学和什么是科学之间确定明确而稳定的界限并不容易。因此，研究的一个关键领域是对这一时期关于在文学和科学工作的不同学科实践、语言和公共活动之间应该划定的新边界的各种讨论进行说明。这些讨论的内容、进行和结论因其发生的历史时刻、所涉个人、机构和媒体以及所讨论的分支学科的状况而有很大的不同。我的书的叙述并不是朝着“两种文化”模式的发展，在文学和科学之间有明确的界限;相反，我想展示不同学科身份的发展是多么复杂，交织和有争议。我的书通过一系列对困难案例的研究，测试并扩展了我们目前对19世纪英国跨学科文化的看法：文学和科学之间的界限受到攻击的地方和场合，挑战，扩大或捍卫。我在所附的支持案例中概述了我选择的章节;简而言之，我的项目是通过三个文化权威库（机构，个人和学科）的例子来调查相互定义的文学和科学实践的令人担忧和参差不齐的出现。虽然最近对19世纪早期文学和科学的重要研究集中在其他调查手段上，特别是出版方法（例如，由Jon Topham等人编辑的优秀作品集，《十九世纪期刊中的科学》（CUP 2004）），我选择了一种方法，使我能够在各种类型和环境中发生的活动之间进行联系和比较，从大学课程到评论，从都市讲座到现实主义小说。我的书将表明，在这一时期，“文学”和“科学”之间的动态谈判是维多利亚时代关于文化的本质和美德的自我意识发展的基础。这本书建立在我以前的专著《空间和心灵的行进》的基础上：文学和自然科学在英国，1815年至1850年，并发展工作，我提出了会议论文在过去三年。

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.