Uncommon Contexts: Encounters between Science and Literature, 1800-1914

Ben Marsden, Hazel Hutchinson, Ralph O'Connor, Ben Marsden, Hazel Hutchinson, Ralph O'Connor

• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9780822981879
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Science History
• Index: Biological Sciences

Britain in the long nineteenth century developed an increasing interest in science of all kinds. Whilst poets and novelists took inspiration from technical and scientific innovations, those directly engaged in these new disciplines relied on literary techniques to communicate their discoveries to a wider audience. The essays in this collection uncover this symbiotic relationship between literature and science, at the same time bridging the disciplinary gulf between the history of science and literary studies. Specific case studies include the engineering language used by Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the role of physiology in the development of the sensation novel and how mass communication made people lonely.

NOTES

Marsden, ‘Introduction’

1. C.P. Snow, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959).

2. D. Brown, The Poetry of Victorian Scientists: Style, Science and Nonsense (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

3. On science and the periodical press, see P. White, ‘Cross-Cultural Encounters: The Co-Production of Science and Literature in Mid-Victorian Periodicals’, in R. Luckhurst and J. McDonagh (eds), Transactions and Encounters: Science and Culture in the Nineteenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), pp. 75–95; G. N. Cantor and S. Shuttleworth (eds), Science Serialized: Representation of the Sciences in Nineteenth-Century Periodicals (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004); G. N. Cantor et al. (eds), Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical: Reading the Magazine of Nature (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

4. G. Beer, ‘Science and Literature’, in R. C. Olby G. N. Cantor, J. R. R. Christie and M. J. S. Hodge (eds), Companion to the History of Modern Science (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 783–98, on p. 785.

5. G. L. Levine (ed.), One Culture: Essays in Science and Literature (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), esp. pp. 3–32 (Levine’s introductory essay ‘One Culture: Science and Literature’).

6. Ibid., pp. 3–4.

7. The phrase ‘historical actors’ emphasizes the recorded action, in language use and otherwise, of historical figures under scrutiny, rather than any Thespian credentials.

8. For a snapshot of key issues, see Beer, ‘Science and Literature’; for a recent Victorian focus, G. Beer, ‘Science and Literature’, in K. Flint (ed.), The Cambridge History of Victorian Literature (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2012) ; and for thoughts on emerging new directions, see G. Dawson, ‘Literature and Science Under the Microscope’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 11 (2006), pp. 301–15.

9. Key early collections include: J. Paradis and T. Postlewait (eds), Victorian Science and Victorian Values: Literary Perspectives (New York: New York Academy of Sciences, 1981); and L. J. Jordanova (ed.), Languages of Nature: Critical Essays on Science and Literature (London: Free Association Books, 1986). A. E. Benjamin, G. N. Cantor and J. R. R. Christie (eds), The Figural and the Literal: Problems of Language in the History of Science and Philosophy, 1630–1800 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987) is primarily concerned with language, metaphor and rhetoric. See also J. Christie and S. Shuttleworth (eds), Nature Transfigured: Science and Literature 1700–1900 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989); G. L. Levine, Realism and Representation: Essays on the Problem of Realism in Relation to Science, Literature, and Culture (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993); G. Beer, Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter (Oxford and New York: Clarendon Press, 1996), bringing together many of the author’s case studies; and H. Small and T. Tate (eds), Literature, Science, Psychoanalysis, 1830–1970: Essays in Honour of Gillian Beer (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).

10. C. Sleigh, Literature and Science (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 15–16; and see R. O’Connor, The Earth on Show: Fossils and the Poetics of Popular Science, 1802–1856 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007), pp. 445–8.

11. A. Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998) addresses book history and the Scientific Revolution; A. Fyfe, Science and Salvation: Evangelical Popular Science Publishing in Victorian Britain (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2004) explores the ‘Christian tone’ purveyed by the Religious Tract Society in its authors’ science writing.

12. Early examples are: S. Shuttleworth, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Science: The Make-Believe of a Beginning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); J. Bourne Taylor, In the Secret Theatre of Home: Wilkie Collins, Sensation Narrative, and Nineteenth-Century Psychology (London: Routledge, 1988). See also J. Reid, Robert Louis Stevenson, Science and the Fin de Siècle (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); and, for a collective approach, C. Schmitt, ‘Science and the Novel’, in J. Kucich and J. B. Taylor (eds), The Nineteenth-Century Novel, 1820–1889 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 461–75. On poetry: T. Levere, Poetry Realised in Nature: Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Early Nineteenth-Century Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) considers Coleridge’s systematic reflections concerning Romantic imaginative, theological and scientific thought.

13. For a classical discussion and some more recent approaches to the knotty problems of ‘popularization’ and the popular’ see: R. Cooter and S. Pumfrey, ‘Separate Spheres and Public Places: Reflections on the History of Science Popularization and Science in Popular Culture’, History of Science, 32 (1994), pp. 237–67; B. Lightman, Victorian Popularizers of Science: Designing Nat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of Contributors
• List of Figures
• Introduction
• I Literary Genres of Science Writing
• II Pushing the Boundaries of ‘Literature and Science’
• III Science and Technology in Fiction
• Notes
• Index