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Journal of Victorian Culture 12.1 (2007) 86-96

Science and Victorian Literature:
A Personal Retrospective
George Levine
(Rutgers University)

In a forward-looking recent essay on the field of 'science and literature' (JVC 11.2), Gowan Dawson – with scholarly authority and sharp critical insight – has both described recent developments in that study andput to question certain of its prevailing assumptions. In particular, he questions the tendency of interdisciplinary scholars, eager to find connections among activities that had traditionally been treated as heterogeneous, to assume a 'common context' for both science and literature, and to overlook the ways in which science and literature were, in certain respects, after all, antagonistic. In addition, he raises critical questions about the 'often ambivalent relation between literature and science studies and recent approaches to the history of science'. His essay does considerable salutary work in problematizing issues that need to be problematized, implying if not firmly asserting that there are after all boundaries, and boundaries that need to be both recognized and respected, between disciplines, between diverse aspects of a culture – in our instance, Victorian culture. His argument is not, of course, even remotely against interdisciplinarity, but insists on what I am tempted to call a more humble interdisciplinarity. Dawson's shattering case against the sort of 'literary Darwinism' that hagiographically imposes a crude, 'truly scientific', Darwinian model on all literature makes a strong case in point. Interdisciplinarity is a far more tricky and demanding enterprise than – in these heady days of cultural studies, with the work of critics like Gillian Beer and Mary Poovey and historians of science like Robert Young and Adrian Desmond and Jim Moore and James Secord ongoing and behind us – we are inclined to let ourselves recognize.

At the invitation of the editors to provide a kind of retrospect on my relations to the field, I will be moving back into some of the territory that Dawson explored. When I first entered that territory, I did so with considerably less sophistication than he brings to it now. But I have been [End Page 86] invited to be backward-looking, and I will take advantage of that invitation to reminisce on the subject with the hope that I might along the way reaffirm some points that I have, perhaps unfairly, inferred from Dawson's essay. For with all its salutary insistence on the historicity of science, Dawson seems to suggest that a little disciplinary humility in such interdisciplinary study is not a bad thing, and that – although I am myself the editor of a volume called One Culture1 – there are indeed boundaries. I don't mean to be droopy and negative, where Dawson was forward looking and exuberant, but rather, out of the excitement with which I jumped unreflectingly into the field and the enthusiasm I have continued to feel for it, to temper our confidence just a bit that the 'one culture' approach is entirely adequate to the problems or that interdisciplinarity allows us to be regardless of 'discipline'.

I began with virtually no theoretical sophistication at all, but was pulled into the field by the persistent fact that many of the Victorian writers I cared about were preoccupied with apparently scientific issues. How then did science impinge on the world of Victorian literature, and how might critics and scholars approach the question? I realized rather quickly that I needed some theoretical equipment – some way to think about 'influence', some way to talk about science without falsifying what it might have been for the scientists, and for Darwin in particular, some notion of how science operated in culture, and indeed how science was a critical part of culture. In the study of literature, science was only one of those 'background' features that a good scholar would dutifully trot out when something in a novel or a poem seemed to allude to it. It was not an obvious assumption of the literary culture of my own time or of the culture of this moment, for that matter, that science – and of course it...

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