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

我将在申请期内完成的这本书是一本关于英国从摄政时期到1859年物种起源年之间文学与科学关系的新书。在过去的二十多年里，浪漫主义和维多利亚时期的研究对文学和科学之间的关系越来越感兴趣。最近的原始资料集，如蒂姆·富尔福德的五卷本《科学与浪漫主义》(Routledge，2002年)，劳拉·奥蒂斯的《十九世纪的文学与科学》(OUP，2002年)和A·S·韦伯的《十九世纪科学：选集》(布罗德维尤，2000年)，使各种科学著作向文学观众提供。这些学者以及(在英国)埃莉诺·谢弗、蒂姆·富尔福德、高恩·道森和其他许多人在20世纪80年代继续进行了开创性的学术工作，如Gillian Beer、George Levine和Sally Shuttleworth的工作，给出了那个时期科学和文学作家、读者、思想和术语之间互动的更详细的图景。这部著作确立了19世纪的文学和科学必须相互渗透的认识。但是，关于19世纪科学与文化的关系，还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工作被其他学科的成员所了解的过程和机制。现有的学术研究表明，在19世纪头几十年，要明确和稳定地界定什么是文学，什么是科学并不容易。因此，研究的一个关键领域是对这一时期关于不同学科做法、语言和文学和科学工作的公共活动之间的新界线应如何划定的各种讨论进行记述。这些讨论的内容、进行和结论大不相同，取决于它们发生的历史时刻、所涉及的个人、机构和媒体以及所讨论的分学科的状况。我这本书的叙述并不是朝着文学和科学之间有明确界限的“两种文化”模式的版本前进；相反，我想展示不同学科身份的发展是多么复杂、相互交织和有争议。我的书通过一系列对艰难案例的研究，测试并扩展了我们目前对19世纪英国跨学科文化的看法：文学与科学之间的界限受到攻击、挑战或捍卫的地方和场合。我在所附的案例中概述了我选择的章节作为支持；简而言之，我的项目是通过三个文化权威储存库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：机构、个人和学科。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，Jon Topham等人编辑的优秀文集，《19世纪期刊中的科学》(Cup 2004))，但我选择了一种方法，使我能够在各种流派和环境中发生的活动之间建立联系和比较，从大学课程到评论，从都市讲座到现实主义小说。我的书将展示这一时期“文学”和“科学”之间的动态谈判是维多利亚时代对文化本质和美德的自我意识发展的基础。这本书建立在我之前的专著《空间和《心灵进行曲》：英国的文学和物理科学，1815-1850年》的基础上，也发展了我在过去三年作为会议论文提交的工作。

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.