1
'Heredity, heredity!': Evolutionary biology in the works of Henry James, Elizabeth Robins
and Edith Wharton
Reviewing Henry James's disastrous play Guy Domville in 1895, George Bernard Shaw wrote
dismissively that, 'it takes us back to the exhausted atmosphere of George Eliot, Huxley, and
Tyndall’. This linkage of James to a novelist and two scientists reveals him as a keystone in
the legacy of what has been called 'two cultures' debates, especially as they arise from the
arguments presented by Matthew Arnold and Thomas H Huxley in the 1880s. This paper is
organized into two parts: firstly, I demonstrate that James's plays--which have remained
overlooked by critics because of their assumed aesthetic inferiority as compared to his
criticism and novels--demonstrate the extent to which writers engaged with precepts of
evolutionary biology, specifically concerning the transmission of hereditary material.
Secondly, I discuss the role of heredity in the works of two of James's close compatriots: the
well-known author Edith Wharton and the lesser-known playwright, actor, author, and
eventual suffragette Elizabeth Robins. This paper positions James, Wharton, and Robins
alongside more familiar engagements with evolutionary biology such as Shaw's paradigm of
Creative Evolution and Henrik Ibsen's dramatization of heredity, thereby demonstrating the
importance of theatre in understanding this period's relations between literature and
science.
Daniel Ibrahim Abdalla is a DPhil Candidate in English at Wadham College, Oxford. His thesis
considers the way that concerns of the fin-de-siècle--like children, gender, and
inheritance--emerge from advancements in evolutionary biology. He has worked as a
Graduate Research Assistant on the European Research Council project, Diseases of Modern
Life: Nineteenth Century Perspectives and currently convenes the American Literature
Research Seminar at the Rothermere American Institute, Oxford.
2
Consciousness and Materiality: Reading Joyce in the Noosphere
While Joyce was finishing Ulysses in Paris in the years following the First World War, in the
same city and at the same time another group of individuals were working on a theory that,
like Joyce’s innovations in subjectivity, looked to put pressure on how we understand
consciousness. The geologist Vladimir Vernadsky, natural philosopher Edouard le Roy, and
palaeontologist and Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin were together developing the
concept of the ‘noosphere’, premised on examining how cognitive processes play a part in
large scale biological and geological processes (‘noo’ deriving from the Greek for mind,
‘nous’). Arguing that mechanistic accounts of the biosphere overlooked the way in which
the mind is embedded within, rather than extrinsic to, geophysical processes, the noosphere
aimed to bring together the ‘creative world of our imagination and the physical domain of
our material existence.’ [1] Although the noosphere would go on to mean quite different
things for each of these three figures, at its core the concept was informed by an
understanding of evolutionary processes outlaid in Henri Bergson’s L’Evolution
Créatice (1907), a book which Joyce also procured while writing the early episodes
of Ulysses in Trieste. And like Joyce’s Ulysses too, the concept of the noosphere was to some
degree forged as a response to the horrors of war. This paper will suggest that
reading Ulysses alongside the concept of the noosphere offers a new way of understanding
the effects of Joyce’s free indirect discourse and interior monologue, arguing that we can
understand both as making porous the distinction between the inner and the outer and the
material and immaterial, with radical consequences for how we imagine human life.
1 Paul R Samson and David Pitt, ‘Introduction: Sketching the Noosphere’ The Biosphere and
Noosphere Reader: Global Environment, Society and Change (New York: Routledge, 1999),
1-11 (2).
Peter Adkins is Lecturer in Comparative Literature at the University of Kent. He is co-editor
of Virginia Woolf, Europe and Peace: Aesthetics and Theory (2020) and is currently finishing
a monograph entitled The Modernist Anthropocene: Nonhuman Life and Planetary Change
in James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Djuna Barnes.
3
Environmental Crisis and Children’s Picture Books
Children's books with ecological themes have increased in quantity and variety in recent
years as environmental crises has grown more prominent in school curricula and in the
public awareness. From localised occasions of habitat loss and species displacement such as
in The Little Grey Men (1942), The Lorax (1971), Watership Down (1972) and The Animals of
Farthing Wood (1979), contemporary children's literature has tended to move towards
representation of a global ecological consciousness, addressing the worldwide scales of
climate change or the rates of habitat destruction leading to the extinction of species. There
are ethical as well as communicative challenges associated with how and to what extent
these ecological crises and their severity are addressed for the very
young. Picturebooks have particular formal qualities that give unique opportunities
(especially though not exclusively for young reading age groups), such as their ease of
non-realist use of animal characters, and a dynamic interplay of simple words and images
that combine to make complex communications and construct a variety of subject positions
for their implied readers.
In this paper, I explore picturebook strategies for engaging readers with environmental
issues, which include identification with animals, retelling of fables and fairy-tales,
representations of human-nature relations, and promotion of activism especially
through peritexts. Yet, these strategies are not without their pitfalls, which in some cases
risk interfering negatively with the texts’ good intentions. I compare the approaches taken
by Pam Bonsper's The Problem of the Hot World (2015), Mini Grey’s The Last
Wolf (2018), Frann Preston-Gannon’s The Journey Home (2012), and James Sellick and
Preston-Gannon’s There’s a Rang-tan In My Bedroom (2019), whose narratives work to
collapse the gap between the local and the global that can interfere with meaningful
engagement with the causes and impacts of global warming and climate change.
Emily Alder is lecturer in literature and culture at Edinburgh Napier University and
Membership Secretary for the BSLS. Her research interests lie in literature and science,
environmental humanities, and weird, Gothic and science fiction especially of the
late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.
4
Telling the story of the trees: Richard St. Barbe Baker – forest scientist or literary
ecologist?
In 1919, a young evangelist who had spent time on the Canadian prairie, in the home
missions of East London, and the trenches of France, undertook a diploma in Forestry at the
University of Cambridge. For Richard St. Barbe Baker (1889-1982), the experience was to
cement ideas of social and environmental reconstruction and inspire a life-long belief in the
power of tree planting and protection for universal benefit. Baker went on to found the
Men of the Trees, arguably the first global environmental society, which had as its heart the
ambition to restore and preserve the forest mantle of the Earth. He was a prodigious
author, writing books about his numerous exploits, delivering lectures, and publishing
journals. An early proponent of narrative non-fiction, Baker suffused everything with his
autobiography, and his training in the science of Forestry was a key part of that story. By
drawing upon Baker’s account of his studies and the impact they had upon him, whilst
contextualising them within the archives of the Cambridge School of Forestry, the
development of Baker’s own idiosyncratic literary ecology is explored, as well as his impact
on ideas of global sustainability through his genre-hopping works.
Camilla Allen is a PhD candidate in the Department of Landscape Architecture at the
University of Sheffield where she is working on a study of the forester and environmentalist
Richard St. Barbe Baker (1889-1982). Before studying landscape architecture, Camilla
worked in children’s books publishing, and undertakes her research on historical subjects
with a narrative and literary eye.
5
Radical feminism, Feminist Evolutionary Biology, and the Transgendered Female Body in
Angela Carter’s The Passion of New Eve (1977)
Angela Carter’s The Passion of New Eve is a dystopian apocalyptic novel that examines
gender relations and sexual politics in a civil-war torn America through the character of
misogynist British academic Evelyn. Evelyn is kidnapped by militant radical feminists and is
forced to undergo a sex-change, hence transforming into the ultra-feminine Eve, as part of a
feminist biological experiment that aspires to create a new breed of reproductively
independent transgender women, who are impregnated with their own seed by means of
artificial insemination. In my paper, I situate these incidents within radical feminist
discourses of the 1970s, which champion female reproduction without men and call for
all-female utopias. I bring these discourses into dialogue with feminist reimaginings of
utopias, as is discussed in Shulameth Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex (1970), and further
reflected in Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch (1970). I then posit The Passion of New
Eve as a dystopian counter-narrative to these discourses and contextualize the novel within
discussions of feminist evolutionary biology during the 1970s, especially where it concerns
female reproductive technology, such as fertility drugs, artificial insemination, and
surrogacy. I argue that the novel challenges the feminist aspirations regarding reproductive
technologies, expressing an ambivalent and anxious attitude towards it by representing it as
a monstrous and overtly aggressive tool of subordination through the many sufferings that
Eve, as a transgendered biological experiment, endures.
Arwa F. Al-Mubaddel is an English Literature PhD candidate at the School of English,
Philosophy, and Communications at Cardiff University, where she is also a member of the
Assuming Gender Research Group and an editor for the Assuming Gender Journal. Her PhD
is on female subjectivity in British women’s writing, 1960s-1990s.
6
The Decoded Lab
This paper explores the role of textile practice as a means to express scientific enquiry,
reporting on a case study from the University of Leeds Cultural Institute ‘Creative Labs:
Biological Sciences 2nd Edition’. In this process, artists were paired with academics from the
Faculty of Biological Sciences to engage in lab days, exploring how their divergent research
backgrounds might lead to new collaborations. It enabled both parties to discuss ideas
without an agenda, gradually establishing the focus of their engagement.
Paired with biophysicists, textile artist Sonja Andrew initially developed creative work in
response to their protein experiments, positioning textiles within a communication
paradigm to explore how the scientists’ research could be visualised in 2D and 3D form.
Whilst the science formed the catalyst for the textile practice, the biophysicists were also
‘viewers’ within the context of the textile explorations. They fulfilled a dual role of content
provider and ‘informed audience’, becoming part of the cycle of ‘reflection in action’ (Schon,
2000; Getzel & Csikszentmihalyi, 1976) that informed the development of the artefacts.
During the lab visits, the x-ray diffraction studies of textile physicist William Astbury became
the focus for further creative exploration, with the aim of visualising the relationship
between historical and contemporary science to engage viewers in considering how smaller
exploratory studies lead to, and from, major scientific breakthroughs.
Dr Sonja Andrew is a Senior Lecturer in Design at the University of Huddersfield. She
exhibits internationally, with textiles jury selected by peer review for exhibitions in China,
South Korea, Portugal, Belgium, Ukraine, Lithuania and the UK. Her commissioned work
includes pieces for the United Bristol Healthcare Trust and Wells Cathedral. Her designs are
also featured in ‘Textiles, The Art of Mankind’ and the Arts and Humanities Research Council
Image Gallery.
7
Of Bulbs, Arcs, and Watts: Technology and the Language of Poetry
Why and when did an everyday technology like the light bulb become an interesting object
for poetry? Can we see a radical connection between the advent of electric lighting in the
Western world and the need for literary change cried for by modernist poets on both sides
of the Atlantic? In 1926, for example, William Carlos Williams coined the word ‘bulblight’
and employed it to refer to poetic creation, and Hart Crane invented his own free-verse
advertisement for a ‘Mazda’ light in his long poem about New York, The Bridge (1930). For
modernist poets ‘[e]verywhere the electric’ was more than a convenient commodity and a
welcome addition to their everyday life, more than a simple backdrop to their nocturnal city
walks:[1] it was the force inciting and nourishing their poetic practice. This paper will discuss
a couple of instances from my current book project, where modernist poets grapple with
adapting technologically specific language to poetry.
Dr Nicoletta Asciuto is Lecturer in English Literature at the University of York. She is a
Comparative Modernist with research interests in poetry and history of technology.
Nicoletta is currently writing a monograph on the impact of urban electrification on
modernist poetics, entitled Brilliant Modernism: Lighting Technologies and Modernist
Poetics.
[1] ‘Paterson---The Strike’, from ‘The Wanderer: A Rococo Study’, Collected Poems Volume I
1909-1939 (Manchester: Carcanet, 2000), p. 31.
8
Reconfiguring Patterns of Mobility and Knowledge: Contemporary Science Novels and the
Epistemology of the Expedition Narrative
Our contribution explores the connections between our research interests in the forms and
varieties of the scientific expedition narrative, and in the aspects of the transcultural
mobility of scientists and science in contemporary Anglophone fiction. While novels such as
Hanya Yanagihara's The People in the Trees (2013) and Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry
Tide (2004) both involve Western trained scientist characters exploring tropical spaces, they
cannot primarily be classified as scientific expedition narratives. Rather they represent
various combinations and conjunctures of mobility, knowledge, and knowledge production,
linked to various types of scientific and narrative subject positions and subjectivities. As
such, they do more than offer specific and critical accounts of the range of roles which
scientific subjectivities and conceptions can play in transcultural settings. They also enable a
critical perception of the privileged and dominant presence of the ‘prototypical’ scientific
expedition (and expedition narrative) at multiple levels of the practice and of the
representation of science, knowledge and mobility. At the same time, they demonstrate the
limits and limitations of this formation, by locating it in relation with and contrast to other
conjunctures of knowledge and mobility and with differently constituted subject positions.
Our talk will seek to elucidate how each of the two novels, in different ways, contribute to a
(re)conceptualisation and critical analysis of the conditions and implications of knowledge
production in retrospective narrative accounts of the mobility of scientists in diverse cultural
settings.
Anna Auguscik is a lecturer in English Literature at the University of Oldenburg, where she completed her PhD thesis on the role of literary prizes and book reviewing for the literary marketplace. As a Fiction Meets Science (FMS) research fellow she completed a project on the media presence of the science novel and has begun a project on “Scientific Expedition Narratives in Contemporary Historical Fiction” with Anton Kirchhofer. Anton Kirchhofer is Professor of English Literature at the University of Oldenburg. He is a founding co-director of the Fiction Meets Science research group at Oldenburg and Bremen, funded by the Volkswagen Foundation, and has published variously on the functions of scientist characters in contemporary fiction and on the media presence of contemporary science novels. His current research in this context is connected to projects on “The Anglophone Science Novel and the Global Dimensions of Science”. With John Holmes and Janine Rogers, Kirchhofer is also joint series editor of Explorations in Science and Literature published by Bloomsbury Academic, for which the first volumes are due to appear in 2020.
9
The Ghost in the Atomic Machine: Spectral Readings of Nuclear Techno-Sciences
Fred Botting states that ‘[a]llied, ghosts and machines eclipse human faculties,’ (2008). This
assertion seems to encapsulate the two central components of Western nuclear narratives
and their consequences. In Uranium (2009), Tom Zoellner litters his prose with references to
the spectral and the monstrous, utilising ideational rather than empirical language as he
charts the techno-scientific uses of this ‘dark and greasy’ rock. Official U.S. nuclear press
release writer and Manhattan Project journalist William Laurence describes how, ‘the world
became for [him] one vast Poëesque pit over which a uranium pendulum was slowly
swinging down,’ upon attending a 1939 national meeting on nuclear fission, and the
resulting bomb as a ‘spectre’ on the American cultural landscape (1947). In this paper, I will
explore how the Gothic has been, and can be used as a framework through which to chart
the cultural history of uranium, and to construct narratives around this primordial element,
the technologies we have developed from it, and our ambivalence toward them; the
element itself is so unusual and unwieldy that we have had to construct this haunted
language around it, as Zoellner and Laurence do, to articulate our fear of its unstable
properties, this spectrality seemingly also a way of denying or displacing our relationship to
it, and our utilisation of it.
Dr Helena Bacon is an associate lecturer at Anglia Ruskin University and UEA. She has
published work on representations of biology within Matthew Barney films and Carnivàle in
relation to an American carnivalesque, and has forthcoming pieces on Mexican animation,
Gothic Westerns and the short form as connected to East Anglian landscapes. Her first novel
was long-listed for the Mslexia unpublished novel award 2017 and she is currently working
on a critical introduction to the Western.
10
Imagining a Future Sound: Velimir Khlebnikov and Early Soviet Radio
The possibilities offered by early wireless transmission technologies caught the imagination
of Soviet cultural producers like no other medium. In this paper, I discuss radio in relation to
the Russian Futurists, specifically how the idea of radio aligned with this movement’s
anticipation of an ideal future, and their project of creating a ‘new language’ for mass
communication. I focus on the poet Velimir Khlebnikov, who evokes the utopian potential
of radio in a piece of speculative writing titled “Radio of the Future.” Although Khlebnikov
does invision radio as a network of large tower transmitters, I illustrate how he presents
these structures as repositories of audio materials, that is, as objects which inherently
possess information. Moreover, I show how the poet seems unable to articulate
precisely what he hears or will hear on the radio. In other words, since radio broadcasting
does not adapt writing in the manner of the telegraph, Khlebnikov’s description of a
broadcast turns into a mimetic representation of the radio-tower’s structural form. This
raises an important question that I address in the remainder of the paper: namely, how did
the Futurists treat the question of written textuality in an age that was rapidly producing
alternatives to it through electric signals?
Ana Berdinskikh is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Slavic Languages and
Literatures at Yale University. Her work examines media technologies and cultural
production in the decades surrounding the Russian Revolution. In her dissertation project,
“Wireless Transmissions: Early Russian Radio and Modernist Poetics,” she considers how
cultural producers were participating in a growing technological discourse and
writing/debating/conceiving of methods to achieve “direct” and “instantaneous”
communication that exceeded the capabilities of written text.
11
Test Tube Tiger: Sequencing the Thylacine in Species Revivalist Fiction
From Julia Leigh’s award-winning book, The Hunter (1999) to the speculative science fiction
of Deborah Sheldon’s Thylacines (2018), creative representations of extinct species like the
thylacine (or Tasmanian Tiger) demonstrate an ongoing fascination with the prospect of
resurrecting extinct species. But in their manipulation of the past, present, and future of
extinct species histories, these literary resurrections of long-lost animals generate a pressing
set of problems for the current era. Given that the thylacine has been deemed a candidate
for de-extinction by scientists in Australia, in what way does the literary representation of
species revivalism negotiate the cultural space needed to grapple with this prospective
resurrection? Moreover, do species revivalist fictions of the thylacine merely re-enact a
fantasy of reversing losses in species biodiversity, or are they undergirded with an
infrastructure of ethical responsibility that incites readers to prevent further species
extinctions? Reading these fictions and related visual archives (particularly the work of
artists Maria Lux and Rachel Berwick) as an expression of species revivalist “sequencing,” I
argue that representations of the “test tube tiger” act on and respond to conceptual
histories of life, death, and species imaginaries in the wake of the sixth mass extinction.
Sarah Bezan is a British Academy Newton International Fellow at The University of Sheffield
Animal Studies Research Centre. She is the co-editor of Seeing Animals After Derrida
(Lexington Books Ecocritical Theory & Practice Series, 2018) and is currently at work on a
book project on species loss and revival in a biotechnological age.
12
The Degenerate Spouse: Eugenics and Marriage in Arabella Kenealy’s The Marriage
Yoke and Gabriele Reuter’s “Eines Toten Wiederkehr”
During the late 19th and early 20th century, eugenics emphasized human intervention to
rectify a perceived distortion of the ‘natural’ evolutionary progress. One of the interventions
advocated by eugenicists was the prevention of marriages that were deemed incompatible.
The union between the ‘fit’ and the ‘unfit’ was constantly propagated as the reason behind
the degeneration of the race, especially in the wake of the rediscovery of Mendel’s theories
in heredity and the repudiation of Lamarckism. Both Arabella Kenealy’s The Marriage Yoke
(1904) and Gabriela Reuter’s “Eines Toten Wiederkehr” (1908) portray the tragedy of such a
marriage to a defective partner. Moreover, they emphasis the lost potential of this
marriage, both for the individual and the nation, by also introducing healthier characters
with whom a better eugenic match could have been made. Instead, the healthy partners are
burdened by the care and nursing of their mentally and physically defective partners and
children. In this paper I will not only show how scientific discourses are echoed and
mediated within the narrative, but also how they are used to advocate for social change.
For, apart from their overt stance within the eugenic debate, both narratives also advocate
for legal marriage reform.
Fatima Borrmann. I am doing my Phd at KU Leuven, researching British and German female
authors who engaged with eugenics in their fiction during the late 19th and early 20th
century. I did my MA in English Literature and Culture at the Ruhr Universität Bochum and
my research interests are Modernism, gender, biopower, essentialism and postcolonial
theory.
13
The Poultry Suicide Club: Animals in Early Automotive Culture
In the first automotive periodical ever published in the English language—The Horseless
Age—the editor E. P. Ingersoll claimed that the automobile was a ‘humane’ technology,
which would ensure the liberation of horses from human service. Whilst the automobile
offered equines some relief from their heavier burdens, this form of humanitarianism
sought to remove horses entirely from human society—to usher in a horseless age. In this
paper, I evaluate the extent to which early automotive culture truly encouraged the humane
treatment of nonhuman animals in the U.S., considering factors such as roadkill and habitat
destruction notably absent from automobile advertisements. By analysing some of the
earliest texts of a now-classic U.S. genre—the road narrative—I will reveal some surprising
features of our relationship with this revolutionary technology. Human tendency to
zoomorphise these machines leads to the formation of emotional bonds, and even calls for
more ‘humane treatment of automobiles.’ In a world where humans have increasingly
fewer meaningful relationships with other animals, what does it mean to care about
cars—to love horsepower more than horses?
179 words.
Daniel J. Bowman is a WRoCAH-funded PhD candidate at the University of Sheffield. His
project, Horsepower: Animals in Automotive Culture, 1895-1935, explores the impact of the
automobile on the lives of animals, both human and nonhuman, in U.S. literature. Daniel is
also a member of the Sheffield Animal Research Centre (ShARC).
14
Minds and Machines in Children’s Fantastika: Locating Consciousness in the Mesh of
Nature
This paper reads works of contemporary children’s literature to investigate the philosophical
and scientific problem of consciousness. Peter Brown’s The Wild Robot (2018) and Padraig
Kenny’s Tin (2018) depict characters whose mechanical bodies and artificial minds conjure
the image of the ‘ghost in the machine’ – Gilbert Ryle’s (1949) famous excoriation of
Descartes’ mind/ body dualism. As new materialists have argued in recent years (see, e.g.,
Coole and Frost, 2010), Cartesian dualism remains entrenched in Western thought and
politics despite convincing philosophical and scientific objections. There are significant
challenges to deconstructing dualism, though, not least the risk of reducing mentality to
materiality in its most passive and essentialist formulation. This paper proposes the
machines of recent children’s literature as material-semiotic figurations that demand
alternative concepts of mind and matter, drawing on insights from biosemiotics,
bioinformatics and cybernetics. Building on extant work on posthumanism in children’s
literature criticism (Flanagan 2014; Jacques, 2015), this paper proposes an ecological
reading of the mind, locating consciousness within the ‘mesh’ of nature.
Chloé Germaine Buckley is a Senior Lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University and
member of the Centres for Gothic Studies and Youth Studies. She has published widely on
gothic, horror and fantasy, including the monograph Twenty-First-Century Children’s Gothic
(EUP, 2017). Her current project is a monograph titled Speculative Entanglements: Figuring
Materiality in Contemporary Children’s Fantastika.
15
Idealized Logic in Dumas’ Le Vicomte de Bragelonne
In the early twentieth century, Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead undertook the
ambitious task of creating a complete formal numerical system, one which could be defined
entirely without internal inconsistency, on the sole basis of set theory. Russell and
Whitehead’s system would ultimately fail to achieve its proposed end due to Russell’s
paradox – the proposed existence of a set of sets that are not members of themselves.
Whether this hypothetical set is presumed to contain itself or not, such a presumption will
necessarily contradict the set’s own definition. Interestingly, Alexandre Dumas’ Le Vicomte
de Bragelonne presents a number of examples of a form of Russell’s paradox roughly fifty
years before the paradox was first articulated, examples which this paper proposes to
explore in greater detail. What is revealed is Dumas’ telling tendency to escape the logically
murky in favor of clear resolutions that skirt, rather than resolve, the paradox, through a
series of artificial techniques including jumps outside of an irresolvable contradiction and a
persistent refusal to engage in infinite regress.
Thomas Byron holds a PhD in French Literature from Boston University, where his
dissertation focused on the philosophy of science in Balzac, Zola, Queneau, and
Houellebecq, with portions recently appearing in Epistemocritique and Intertexts. His legal
scholarship, marrying philosophy and intellectual property law, has appeared in a variety of
journals.
16
‘‘Twas all one!’: Literary and Scientific Culture in C19th Welsh Mutual Improvement
Societies
‘It is with pleasure we announce that, in the lecture room of this Institution, the lovers of
literature and science may have the opportunity of cultivating a knowledge of these
important attainments’, noted the Amlwch Literary Scientific Institution (Carnarvon and
Denbigh Herald, 22nd April 1848). A year previously, this same society congratulated
themselves on completing the Institution: ‘the first Building ever dedicated solely and
exclusively to the purposes of Literature and Science in North Wales!’. This society is one
instance of a much larger movement: during the nineteenth-century, many of these mutual
improvement and literary societies (MISs) were set up in local communities, by local,
working people, to extend the education and intellectual engagement of working class and
lower-middle class men (and sometimes women). MISs held lectures on a variety of subjects
given by visiting speakers, and often set up reading rooms and lending libraries.
This paper traces the holistic nature MIS education, where science and literature were not
two separate cultures, but could be used to illuminate one another. Drawing on archival
materials, I show how these societies juxtaposed literature and science in their syllabi,
libraries and manuscript magazines, even as the Arnold/Huxley debate filtered down into
regional discussions.
Catherine Charlwood (MA, MPhil, Cambridge; PhD, Warwick) is a Research Staff Developer
at Liverpool and an Honorary Research Associate at Swansea. She has published various
litsci articles, and her current book project concerns memory in the poetry of Hardy and
Frost. Catherine also co-hosts LitSciPod: The Literature and Science Podcast.
17
Female Authored Illness Narratives in Singapore and Southeast Asia
Within the latter half of the twentieth century, pathographies; illness narratives authored by
patients, poets, novelists, etc., have been established as a literary genre, offering privileged
insight into the experience of sickness from the patient’s perspective.
By engaging with the interdisciplinary field of medical humanities within Singaporean and
Southeast Asian literature, my research focuses on the experience of the female body,
exploring connections between pathographies to examine cultural approaches to health and
illness. Through an investigation into the articulation of pain within A Pain in the Neck (2004)
by Grace Chow, Red Ants Crawling To My Urine (2004) by Josephine Tan, and A Silent
Fighter (2014) by Jane Tan, this research analyses the various competing and overlapping
discourses – scientific, familial, etc. – within female authored work, illustrating the
significance of intersections of gender, culture, and medicine in the expression of illness.
To date, limited critical attention has been paid to illness narratives from outside of the UK
and USA, my research therefore engages with the intellectual imperative to provide greater
focus on Singaporean and South East Asian women’s writing within the emergent medical
humanities field.
Cat Chong is a PhD student at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore where
their work utilises gender as a point of inquiry into Singaporean and Southeast Asian literary
production. Their research interests include disability studies, feminism, and ecology.
18
Beyond the Prognosis: An Examination of Resilience in Terminally Ill Pediatrics through
Illness Narratives
Child mortality has greatly decreased since the advent of modern medicine in the 1950s,
which significantly influenced cultural perceptions of death and mortality (Roser et. al).
Whereas families in the nineteenth century were largely inured to death, a child’s death in
the twenty-first century is generally considered premature and unexpected (DeSpelder and
Strickland). Since a child has a limited capacity to act, medical decisions including the
cessation of treatment are typically made by their parents. This incapacity reduces the
patient’s autonomy and sense of self, and is further exacerbated by the power imbalance
within the doctor-patient relationship as mature pediatric patients (aged 14-21) risk having
their voice doubly negated as both a patient and a child.
Terminal illness narratives such as Regine’s Book (2012) by Regine Stokke, Before I
Die (2007) by Jenny Downham and Five Feet Apart (2018) by Lippincott et. al illustrate these
complexities through personal experiences of pediatric illness and dying. These narratives
depict children as highly resilient in the face of terminal illness and starkly contrast the
biomedical model’s singular focus on curative treatment. These texts also reveal the ways in
which terminal pediatric patients renegotiate their desire for normalcy against various
limitations as a form of resilience and seek to preserve their personhood beyond their
prognosis.
Ivy Chua is currently pursuing a Masters of Arts (English) at the Nanyang Technological
University. Her research interest includes the medical humanities and contemporary
literature, with a primary focus on terminal illness narratives. Her article “Humanities for
Health” (2018) which was first written for Constellations (Issue 1) has also been republished
by the Asia Pacific Biotech News.
19
This Poisonous, White, Crumbling Poem: Inger Christensen’s alphabet as an Irradiated
Text
In 2019, threats of nuclear warfare and climate change led the Bulletin of the Atomic
Scientists to set the world’s doomsday clock at two minutes to midnight, a level only
reached at one other point in history: 1953, when the United States and the Soviet Union
began weapons testing as part of the Cold War. Nuclear technologies hold a special
significance in ecocritical studies of Anthropocene literature, with the Trinity Test being
identified by some critics as the moment that defines the beginning of the Anthropocene.
To develop a poetics of the Anthropocene, we must therefore look to a poetics of the
nuclear, a poetics that expresses the insidious contamination of radiation, and the
entangled temporalities of nuclear time. Inger Christensen’s 1981 poem alphabet is a text
haunted by its nuclear context. I argue that the alphabetical, mathematical and repetitious
structures in alphabet mirror the uncanny intermingling or ‘thickening’ of time(s) that we
experience in the Anthropocene. Referring to Jacques Derrida’s Spectres of Marx, I argue
that alphabet can be read as an irradiated landscape, with repeating words acting as textual
isotopes, contaminating Christensen’s poem with the spectre of our radioactive legacies.
Hannah Cooper-Smithson is a poet and PhD student from Nottingham Trent University. Her
thesis is a critical-creative interrogation of form in contemporary ecopoetry and is funded by
the AHRC Midlands3Cities DTP. Her poetry has been published in various journals,
including The Interpreter's House, Plumwood Mountain and becoming-Botanical: a
postmodern liber herbalis (Objet-a Creative Studios, 2019).
20
Dancing and Oscilloscopes: Native Americans, Los Alamos and the Atomic Bomb
Dexter Masters' novel, The Accident (1955), set in Los Alamos, New Mexico where the
atomic bomb was first built, begins with a pointed comparison between local pueblo
cultures and those of the nuclear scientists. There is, Masters writes, 'a transmuting
moment' in Native American ceremonies when 'the priest says the word and from that point
on everything is potent, has meaning, is to be respected and feared.' Similarly, in nuclear
laboratories 'scientists danced ... like priests at a fiesta and circled the fires of their
oscilloscopes,' ‘the word [fission] was said’ and 'magic was brought in, everything was
potent.'
This paper considers the Manhattan Project through the intersections of technological
modernity with the indigenous cultures of New Mexico. In numerous novels about Los
Alamos, scientists decorate their homes with Native American artefacts, engage as tourists
with indigenous peoples, landscapes and architecture, and employ people from various local
communities to clean their homes and perform other services. Yet, as Masters illustrates,
there is space in these fictions for a more profound coming together, a juxtaposition of
alternative cosmologies that reveals the ceremonies and cultural norms governing scientific
and technological enterprises in the nascent nuclear state.
Daniel Cordle is Associate Professor in English and American Literature at Nottingham Trent
University. He specialises in studying nuclear culture, but has also worked on literature,
science and the two cultures debate. His most recent book is Late Cold War Literature and
Culture: The Nuclear 1980s (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).
21
‘[E]ssentially a popular science’: Astronomy in Early Twentieth-Century British Periodicals
In the preface to her 1890 book, The System of the Stars, Agnes M. Clerke described
astronomy as ‘essentially a popular science’, before arguing for the importance of ‘literary
treatment’ as ‘the foe of specialisation’. In this paper I will explore examples of the, if not
literary, at least non-specialist, representation of the quintessentially popular science of
astronomy in a number of early twentieth-century British generalist periodicals. I will
consider both articles which specifically seek to explain and describe particular aspects of
astronomy, and pieces that touch on it merely in passing. I will also discuss examples of
advertisements using astronomical ideas and imagery, such as the ‘wireless message from
Mars’ about Dunlop tyres in the Cornhill Magazine in 1901. As a particularly visual science,
astronomy was especially well suited to presentation in a publication like the Illustrated
London News, which will be my main focus here, but I will also reflect on the differences
between the news-like, illustrated, approach of this weekly, and the more wordy,
non-illustrated, approaches of reviews like the New Quarterly (1907-10) in order to consider
what such varying styles can tell us about the popular status of astronomy and its ‘literary
treatment’ during this period.
Rachel Crossland is a Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Chichester. Her first
book, Modernist Physics: Waves, Particles, and Relativities in the Writings of Virginia Woolf
and D. H. Lawrence, was published by Oxford University Press in March 2018.
22
"We and the Beasts are Kin”: Ernest Thompson Seton’s Wild Animals I Have Known and
Canadian Human-Animal Kinship
“I hope some herein find emphasized a moral as old as Scripture – we and the beasts are
kin…Since, then, the animals are creatures with wants and feelings differing in degree only
from our own, they surely have their rights” (Seton 1898). Canadian writer Ernest Thompson
Seton’s remarks about the rights of animals exemplify the changing attitudes towards
animals in nineteenth-century North America. Moreover, Seton’s statement concisely
stresses the ethical questions percolating in late nineteenth-century literature and culture:
what is the status of animals in the post-Darwinian sociopolitical landscape of Canada, and
more urgently, in a period when humans were dependent on animals for their own
existence? Seton, a self-proclaimed artist-naturalist, sought to answer these questions with
his ‘realistic histories’ of wild animals. The shift to interest in animal intelligence and
consciousness from the 1860s onward – as opposed to an interest in taxonomy and
classification – led to a desire to understand the experiences of other animals – their
subjectivity, their interiority, their individuality – and the various means which could be
employed to reach this understanding. This paper posits why writing about Seton is
important to our understanding of not only animal subjects, but also to defining the place of
Canadian literature about animals within other discourses of British Victorian fiction.
Lauren Cullen is a doctoral candidate in English at the University of Oxford. She received her
BA (Honours) and MA from Queen’s University, Canada. Her thesis explores nonhuman and
human animal kinship as well as animal subjectivity in nineteenth-century literature and
culture. Her research interests include literature and science, animal studies, and sensation
fiction.
23
‘Imagining a climate-change future in the works of Margaret Atwood’
This paper argues that Margaret Atwood’s works participate in a vibrant debate around
climate change and sustainability. Readings of Surfacing (1972) emphasise the themes of
Canadian survival and victimhood, which are explored in Survival: a thematic guide to
Canadian literature (1972). Retrieval to nature leads the protagonist in Surfacing to explore
notions of self and boundaries between ‘evil’ cities and uncontrollable forces of
nature. Almost fifty years since Survival and Surfacing, this presentation demonstrates the
ways in which Oryx and Crake (2003) reverses the situation: we ‘no longer fear that the
monster will kill us’, ‘we kill it’ (“Survival: A Demi-Memoir”, Survival, 2012). By critiquing an
irreparable self-inflicted disaster, Oryx and Crake (1972) highlights the complexities of
climate change and the challenges of sustainability in a fictional world where global
warming and mass decimation co-exist.
Gemma Curto is a PhD Candidate in English Literature at the University of Sheffield. Her
research lies on interdisciplinary approaches to the relationship between literature,
scientific methodologies and ecology. She has recently reviewed books for the British
Society for Literature and Science, for the British Journal for the History of Science and
Notes and Queries. Gemma has also worked on mathematics and science: reading Borges’s
‘The Garden of Forking Paths’ ‘super-space’ and ‘super-time’ through the lenses of chaos
theory (2017).
24
The Weird Engine: Bodies, Sustainability, and Train Fantasies in Snowpiercer
When considering sustainability, Graeme Macdonald suggests that Science Fiction is “the
genre par excellence influencing the full spectrum of the energy imaginary” (2016). This
paper binds this energetic approach to a world-ecological reading of Bong Joon-ho’s
Snowpiercer (2013), a filmic reimagining of Jacque Lob and Jean-Marc Rochette’s
apocalyptic graphic novel Le Transperceneige (1982). It argues that Snowpiercer critiques
the political unconscious equivalency of scientific progress and neoliberal expansion by
problemetising market-driven logics of sustainability, and how these logics curtail
alternative solutions — an underdeveloped capacity of its source-material. The period of
neoliberal financialization that spanned the decades between the texts is bound to a
technocratic ideology that is critically spatialised in the architecture of the film’s fantastical
train, its supposed perpetual-motion engine weirdly sustaining contemporary class
relations. For Jason Moore, such an “epoch-making innovation” should “drive down the
share of world nature directly dependent on the circuit of capital” (2011), reshaping the
social complex. Instead, the bodies of the passengers are subordinated to the engine and
integrated into its infrastructural workings. This weird literalisation of energetic relations
combines with the film’s melodramatic subversion of filmic realism to highlight the
fetishisation of innovation as a violent barrier to the utopian imagination.
Joshua D’Arcy is a PhD Student in the Department of English and Related Literature at the
University of York. He is currently writing his world-literary thesis on weirdness,
infrastructure, and the world-ecology, focusing on contemporary fiction and media from
artists including Nicola Barker, Dimitri Glukhovski, and Reza Negarestani.
25
Quantum Physics, Process Philosophy, and the Mid-Twentieth Century Origins of
Ecopoetics
This paper traces the diverse scientific influences that inform the American poet Muriel
Rukeyser’s mid-century manifesto for avant-garde poetics, The Life of Poetry (1949),
including the popularisation of quantum physics, the birth of ecosystems ecology, and the
emergence of cybernetics. The paper goes on to argue that Rukeyser’s ‘organic, process
poetics’, first debuted in The Life of Poetry, is only fully realised creatively in her 1969
collection The Speed of Darkness.1 Drawing on extensive archival material including
Rukeyser’s unpublished forward to this later collection, her first drafts and notes, the paper
reads The Speed of Darkness alongside Stacy Alaimo’s contemporary material ecofeminist
criticism. This ‘material’ ecocritical analysis of the collection exposes the degree to which
Rukeyser’s experimental poetics radically reimagines the human as both ‘trans-corporeal’
and as ‘always intermeshed within’ an agential material environment, anticipating
contemporary work in new materialism.2 The paper ends by placing Rukeyser’s mid-century
(eco)poetic experimentation within the wider context of the transatlantic development of
ecopoetry and arguing that Rukeyser’s mid-century ecopoetics has a significant and
unrecognised legacy within contemporary ecopoetry.
Dr Sarah Daw is Vice-Chancellor’s Fellow in Environmental Humanities at the University of
Bristol. She has previously held postdoctoral and visiting research fellowships at The
Institute for Advanced Studies, University of Edinburgh. Her first monograph Writing Nature
in Cold War American Literature was published in 2018 with Edinburgh University Press.
26
Global AI Narratives: Using Literature & Science Studies to Disrupt the Scientific Status
Quo
Kanta Dihal
There are few fields, if any, in which literature has had a greater influence on science than in
artificial intelligence (AI). Millennia-old dreams of intelligent machines have shaped the
hopes, fears, and expectations for contemporary technology. Yet this influence has not been
singularly positive. From the twentieth century onwards, both those who have imagined
fictional AI and those who have attempted to build it have been part of a narrow elite of
mostly white male Americans.
Yet, although much AI technology is developed in Silicon Valley, the West is not the only
place to ever have imagined the existence of intelligent machines. Different religious,
linguistic, philosophical, literary and cinematic traditions have led to different conceptions
of AI. Many of these worldviews are currently not given the attention they deserve, both
within cultures and between them. Literature and science research can therefore provide an
important and timely intervention in this space.
This paper will present the findings of the first year of the Global AI Narratives research
project, which aims to disrupt the status quo of Western AI narratives by identifying,
platforming, and disseminating AI narratives from around the world. I will be sharing
perspectives on intelligent machines gathered from workshops in Singapore, Japan, Russia,
and Egypt.
Kanta Dihal is the Principal Investigator on the Global AI Narratives project at the
Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, University of Cambridge. She explores
intercultural public understanding of artificial intelligence as constructed by fictional and
nonfictional narratives. She is co-editor of AI Narratives (OUP, 2020) and is currently
working on two monographs.
27
Wireless Echoes: Absence, Bereavement and Sound Technology in John van
Druten’s Flowers of the Forest and Joe Corrie’s Martha
In the inter-war period, occultist belief underwent a strong renaissance in anglophone
countries. In the United Kingdom alone, the conjunction of thousands of deaths caused by
World War I and the increased engagement with new communication technologies fuelled
the creation of new metaphors and mythologies, which flourished in the fragmentation that
characterized post-war climate and modernist culture. The functioning mechanisms of
sound technologies, such as telephone, gramophone and radio, held a certain paranormal
lure; the development of the wireless inspired avenues of telepathic research. This paper
considers two occultist war plays, John van Druten’s 1934 Flowers of the Forest and Joe
Corrie’s 1935 Martha, to discuss the intertwinement of spiritualist and scientific discourse
within popular culture. Both plays stage experiences of telepathic communication with
deceased World War I soldiers, framing telepathy as a healing tool for mourners. The paper
argues that bereavement held a leading role in cementing the amicable relationship
between scientific enquiry and the spectral. Taking into consideration the relationship
between physical bodies and disembodied voices, this study follows the trail of the wireless
within the dramatic texts, in order to detect, within them, the influence of what Roger
Luckhurst has termed ‘the technologization of the occult’ on inter-war mourning practices.
Marta Donati is a current second year PhD student at the University of Sheffield, working on
spectrality and bereavement in inter-war British and American theatre. She previously
completed a BA in English and Related Literature and an MA in Film and Literature at the
University of York. She is part of the WRoCAH Electronic Soundscapes Network.
28
James Joyce's Nonhuman Ecologies
In this paper I will focus on James Joyce’s investments in life at the microscopic level
in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake as a way of linking literature and science methodology with
Grusin’s 2015 concept of a ‘nonhuman turn’ within animal studies and ecocriticism. My
particular intervention will be to turn an established historical conversation about Joyce’s
knowledge of the nature of matter and embodied experience towards his aesthetic and
ethical emphasis on nonhuman life, and consider how his interests in science facilitate
connectedness across different categories of being. Previous ecocritical scholarship on Joyce
has mostly concerned itself with whole entities, whether human or nonhuman, from Joyce’s
representation of rivers or trees to Joyce’s attitudes to particular species and biological
principles; I hope by going smaller to go bigger via Tim Clark’s emphasis on the importance
of literary scale-framing in response to the climate crisis. Clark argues that our daily ethical,
aesthetic and critical decisions should be multiplied by ‘both by zero and by infinity’ in order
to determine our personal responsibility for the environment. I will argue that Joyce’s use of
the nonhuman microscopic scale, informed by the complexities of quantum physics, might
help us to cope with that difficult equation.
Katherine Ebury is Senior Lecturer in Modern Literature at the University of Sheffield. Her
first monograph, Modernism and Cosmology, appeared in 2014, and she is the co-editor
(with Dr James Alexander Fraser) of Joyce's Non-Fiction Writings: Outside His Jurisfiction,
which appeared with Palgrave in 2018. Her articles have appeared in journals such as Irish
Studies Review, Joyce Studies Annual, Journal of Modern Literature, and Society and Animals.
29
Frontiers of Time and Space: Manifest Destiny and Scientific Authority in Two American
Prehistoric Interplanetary Romances of the 1890s
This paper focuses on two scientific romances: A Journey in Other Worlds (1894) by the New
York multimillionaire J. J. Astor IV and Journey to Venus (1895) by the Washington
homeopathic physician Gustavus W. Pope. In these action-packed stories, crack teams of
American explorers violently colonise other planets, which, in a recurring trope of the
period, are inhabited by prehistoric animals. At the time the United States was fast
becoming the home of vertebrate palaeontology thanks to incredible fossil resources, most
of these resources unearthed via the country’s westwards expansion—'Manifest Destiny’.
With the frontier closing, white imperialists like Astor hungered for new avenues of
expansion. The nascent genre of prehistoric interplanetary fantastic fiction allowed
characters to symbolically conquer the past, present, and future. I will show how Astor and
Pope used Jupiter and Venus as imaginative spaces for American expansion; moreover, I will
argue that both authors used their fiction to promote an entrepreneurial and democratic
approach to participation in science. These bombastic and often disturbing texts provide
important insights into the relationship between scientific knowledge, romance, and
imperialism in the 1890s, when the United States was on the brink of the Spanish-American
war.
Richard Fallon. I am an Honorary Research Associate in the Department of Science and
Technology Studies at University College London. I received my PhD in English from the
University of Leicester in 2019 and my monograph, Reshaping Dinosaurs in Late Victorian
and Edwardian Literature, is under review with Cambridge University Press.
30
“A Study in Puerperal Mania:” Alienating the Audience through a Realist Performance of
Disease in the Early-Modernist British Theatre
When the Independent Theatre Society staged Florence Bell’s and Elizabeth Robins’s Alan’s
Wife in 1893, the reception in the press was hostile. The play portrays a woman who kills
her new-born child and The Observer likened the experience of watching the play to “a visit
to an accident-ward or to an asylum for criminal lunatics.” The play’s harrowing subject
matter and the gritty realism of its representation alienated the audience. Kirsten
Shepherd-Barr has observed that the “work on stage […] became more oppositional to the
audience in both subject matter and form” in the Modernist theatre. In their famously
scandalous inaugural production of Ibsen’s Ghosts (1891) the Independent Theatre Society
had already shown that they did not shy away from a provocative medical theme and Alan’s
Wife continued this tradition by portraying the main character Jean as suffering from
puerperal insanity, now known as postnatal depression. In this paper, I will consider
how Alan’s Wife’s close engagement with the contemporary medical discourse of puerperal
insanity, which had evolved through the nineteenth century with far-reaching consequences
for the dominant cultural narrative of child murder, turned this play into an artistic
experiment with realism on the Modernist stage, balancing shock-value with its capacity for
truth-telling.
Anna Farkas is Assistant Professor of British Literature and Culture at the University of
Regensburg (Germany). She received her doctorate from Magdalen College, Oxford and her
first monograph, Women’s Playwriting and the Women’s Movement, 1890-1918, was
published by Routledge in 2019.
31
Carrier Bags and Heroes: Microbes in Biomedical Mental Health Discourse
A growing body of evidence indicates that human mental health is intimately intertwined
with the ecology of its gut microbiome. Microbiome factors have been found to play a role
in cognition and emotion, in stress and anxiety, and in mental disorders such as
schizophrenia, major depression and anxiety (Mayer et al., 2014; Rieder et al., 2017;
Valles-Collomer et al., 2019). Microbiome science itself is at an early stage and the
complexity of causal pathways between microbiota and host is beyond current
understanding, yet this body of research attracts considerable scientific and public interest,
and major research funding. There is a need to engage with this literature from an
inter-disciplinary perspective, examining the epistemic values and assumptions that underlie
it, and how these embody into healthcare. I analyse 12 highly cited papers in the
microbiota-gut-brain axis literature published within the last decade, tracing the health
protagonists they bring to the fore. In dialogue with Ursula Le Guin’s ‘Carrier Bag theory of
fiction’ (1989), I examine narrative structure and devices in these papers, tracing which
features of the complex encounters between microbiota and host are foreground and
backgrounded. From microbes themselves to metabolites and host-microbiota ecology: who
or what are the mental health protagonists emerging from this literature? I finish by
examining the ontological assumptions behind this body of research, and considering some
epistemic consequences within a public health context.
Bibliography: Mayer, E.A., Knight, R., Mazmanian, S.K., Cryan, J.F., & Tillisch, K. (2014). Gut microbes and
the brain: Paradigm shift in neuroscience. Journal of Neuroscience, 24(46), 15490-15496. https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.3299-14.2014
LeGuin, U. (1989). Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places, Grove Press, New York.
Valles-Colomer, M., Falony, G., Darzi, Y. et al. (2019) The neuroactive potential of the human gut microbiota in quality of life and depression. Nat Microbiol 4, 623–632, doi:10.1038/s41564-018-0337-x
Joana Formosinho is an interdisciplinary PhD fellow at the University of Copenhagen’s
Medical Museion/Department of Public Health. An evolutionary biologist by training and
epistemic pluralist by inclination, Joana works at the intersection of HPS and STS to
understand the impact of gut microbiome research on biocultural and medical ideas about
the human body–and healthcare intervention.
32
In the Forest of Realities – Impossible Worlds In Film and Television Narratives
One of the characteristic features of postmodern changes in the culture of time was the
splintering of the sense of time into multiple temporal scales: from the nanosecond of
computer time to cosmic time, from genetic to geological time, from the microscopic scale
of quantum mechanics to the macroscopic scale of relativity theory. In the 21st century, the
plural time scales are accompanied by a new mode of temporality, marked by Kermode’s
“sense of an ending” in human collective historical consciousness. This time, positioned
between linear historical time and the ultimate end of humanity, was instituted by the turn
of the millennium and 9/11 terrorist attacks. In film and television narratives the collapsed
bridge between the centuries is symbolized by the temporal ruptures brought about by the
release of huge masses of energy (e.g. a nuclear blast in Dark and Twin Peaks, terrorist
attacks in Fringe and Source Code, a meteor hitting the earth in Annihilation, etc). This
energy opens up impossible timespaces, such as parallel universes, special zones
or wormholes. The paper will analyze the temporality of the impossible timespaces and
their relationship and influence on reality on the basis of Alex Garland’s film Annihilation
(2018).
Sonia Front is Assistant Professor at the Institute of English Cultures and Literatures,
University of Silesia, Poland, where she teaches film and contemporary literatures in English.
Her research interests include time and temporality as well as representations
of consciousness in twenty-first century fiction and cinema.
33
Pas si candide, M. Voltaire: Voltaire’s weaponisation of the Ezourvedam in the emergence
of theories of human genesis, 1760-1799
"In September or October of 1760, François-Marie Arouet, more commonly known by his
nom de plume Voltaire (1694-1778), was delivered a manuscript at his château in Ferney by
Louis Laurent de Fédebre, the Chevalier de Maudave (1725-1777). This French manuscript,
entitled Ezourvedam, took the form of a dialogue between two Brahmins: Chumontou, who
“defends the unity of God,” and Biache, a superstitious figure who “believes in the religion
of the Indies.” This article examines Voltaire’s instrumentalisation of the Ezourvedam, which
discusses the origin of the world, to bolster his arguments for polygenesis, which he
favoured over monogenesis because it could explain variations between different races
without recourse to divine intervention. Presented as a dialogue between two
Brahmins—although actually compiled by French Jesuits in India—the Ezourvedam enabled
Voltaire to appropriate an exoticized text to legitimise his theological arguments and attack
the Christian scriptural tradition. By exploring the ways in which Voltaire selectively quoted
from the Ezourvedam in the second edition of his highly influential Essai sur les mœurs et
l’esprit des nations (1761), this article suggests that the philosophe deployed the
manuscript’s alleged exoticism and antiquity to discredit the authority of Biblical
chronologies."
Gianamar Giovannetti-Singh is a doctoral student in History and Philosophy of Science at
the University of Cambridge. His PhD research explores the changing nature of historical and
scientific credibility during the Jesuit China mission and examines the tensions between
globalisation and mondialisation in the emergence of Enlightenment disciplines.
34
From Jane Eyre to Barry the Bee, Or Why the Humanities are Critical in the Current
Ecological Crisis
Since the Enlightenment, science has served widely as the arbiter of nature as it really is. A
powerful and important framework for viewing the world, science is not without its
limitations, however. Certain paradigms are so deeply ingrained that they are not even
recognized as such, even when they are expressly opposed to extant scientific theory. An
expectation of stability in nature and the model of an actor in an environment still
predominate in both biology and physics--the joint foundations of early ecology. These
presumptions help shape what Donna Haraway calls “the chief product of [scientific]
knowledge practices”: Modern Man. This figure, characterized by human exceptionalism
and bounded individualism, is strongly evocative of what Nancy Armstrong argues is the
chief product of the 18th and 19th century novels: the Modern Individual. This paper
considers how this Individual’s story occludes more ecological ways of thinking and being.
Looking back through the Bush-era animation of Dreamworks’ Bee Movie, I argue that the
bildungsroman is built upon a bait-and-switch structure that substitutes the triumph of the
one for addressing the problems of ecology. As such, I suggest, it is precisely where we need
to look for alternative ways of inhabiting our world.
Barri J. Gold is Professor and Chair of English at Muhlenberg College in Allentown,
Pennsylvania. Author of ThermoPoetics: Energy in Victorian Literature and Science (MIT
Press, 2010), she is currently on a year-long research fellowship to complete Experiments in
Novel Ecologies, the book project from which this talk is drawn.
35
Erotomaniacs: Pathological Jealousy and the Medicalisation of Domestic Abuse in the
Victorian Marriage Plot
Jean-Étienne Esquirol’s concept of ‘erotomania’, an ‘idée fixe’ resulting from sexual jealousy
or ‘excessive love’, reached Britain in 1845, and in the years that followed, the influence of
this diagnosis repeatedly surfaced in legal, medical and fiction texts. One psychiatrist wrote
to Trollope to congratulate him on He Knew He Was Right (1869) – a novel which he said
amounted to a more detailed case history of jealous monomania than he had ever seen in
his medical career. Just a few months later, the Married Women’s Property Act (1870) made
new wives exempt from legal couverture (and it became theoretically possible for them to
live separately from their husbands, supporting themselves and any children in their
custody). As their legal powers slipped away, jealous husbands sought alternative ways to
consolidate control in private. This paper investigates the medicalisation and embodiment
of this particularly contentious form of monomania in literary representations of
upper-middle-class domestic abuse and what is now termed ‘coercive control’. Across 50
years, Charles Reade, Anthony Trollope, and John Galsworthy (1866-1906) reveal the
development of erotomania from an experience of the mind to one increasingly defined by
the body, tracking a myriad of ways in which jealous protagonists were wracked by
respiratory, circulatory, and muscular volatilities.
Helen Goodman is Postdoctoral Research Assistant at Bath Spa University, specialising in
mental health and gender in nineteenth-century literature, culture, and medicine. She has
taught at Royal Holloway (University of London), New York University, and Oxford
University. Her publications investigate subjects including London’s lunatic asylums,
monomania, and imperial masculinities.
36
Post-genomic Identities in Sound and Verse
This paper considers the impact of genomics on several rappers and poets. I will use two
responses to the new post-genomic period – Kendrick Lamar’s ‘DNA’ and Michael Symons
Roberts’s ‘To John Donne’ – to establish ways in which genomics has impacted upon
historical sensibility and ideas of selfhood. Then I’ll look at the impact of widespread genetic
testing for ancestry by considering the response of Zaffar Kunial (‘Self-Portrait as Bottom’)
and Residente (Residente) to the ‘evidence’ presented to them by their particular genetic
ancestry tests. I want to focus on ideas of identity, selfhood, and genomic ancestry, as well
as to investigate what kinds of new tools and positions this post-genomic state might offer
to the artist. Finally I’ll think about what this implies for historical sensibility and aesthetics.
Professor Jerome de Groot teaches in the Department of English, American Studies and
Creative Writing at the University of Manchester. He is the author of Consuming
History (2008, 2nd ed. 2016), Remaking History (2015) and The Historical Novel (2009) as
well as numerous articles on historical fictions, re-enactment, manuscript studies and
historiography.
37
Synthesizing Science and Theology against an Analytic Rhetoric
Similar to a too-frequent occurrence within science and literature, science and theology has
been prone to promoting itself as bringing scientific rationality to support an otherwise
imprecise and a-rational field; coupled with the analytical and systematic approach so often
dissecting and cataloguing notionally-distinguishable aspects of the subject at hand (science
and theology; father, son, and spirit; mind and body; etc.), this methodological and
rhetorical pattern undermines many efforts to think together science and theology. Two
texts by Rev. John Polkinghorne, The Faith of a Physicist: Reflections of a Bottom-Up
Thinker (1996) and Living with Hope: A Scientist Looks at Advent, Christmas, and
Epiphany (2003), serve as examples. Both present their subjects for popular, lay audiences
and seek to narrate a consistent world-view in which scientific and theological thinking not
only lay equal claim to an effective description of reality but also are both necessary to the
completion of such an undertaking. Arguing that popularizing presentations of science and
theology have been overly dependent on Ian Barbour’s foundational schematization of four
models for the interaction of science and theology, my goal is to disentangle his
combinations of epistemology, numinosity, and materiality from others’ divisive rhetoric
separating science from theology.
Jenni G Halpin is an associate professor of English at Savannah State University (Georgia,
USA) and Overseas Representative (North America) for the British Society for Literature and
Science. She teaches composition, drama, and British literature. Her scholarship engages
with literature, science, ethics, and temporality, among other things.
38
Genetic Privacy, or What We Talk About When We Talk About Cloning: A Perspective from
Literature and Bioethics
Emerging from the twin revolutions in personal genetic testing and big data, genetic privacy
presents a new and pressing bioethical problem. In contexts as diverse as ancestry testing
and the Golden State Killer investigations, one of the core risks associated with violations
of genetic privacy is an individual’s diminished control over her genetic data. This risk is
especially consequential in family settings because genetic information is shared among
genetic relatives. I argue that a uniquely insightful perspective on the legal, ethical and
political uncertainties surrounding the complex of genetic privacy, control and the family
can be identified in literary fictions about cloning.
In my paper, I discuss how some of the most ambitious cloning novels, Fay Weldon’s
The Cloning of Joanna May (1989), Eva Hoffman’s The Secret (2001), Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never
Let Me Go (2005) and David Gilbert’s &Sons (2013), demonstrate that literary
representations of cloning actually explore what it means when genetic privacy is lost. These
narratives critically illuminate contemporary cultural anxieties around privacy and through
their aesthetics contribute to bioethical
debates an important alternative perspective to bioethicists’ predominantly empirical
outlook. I close by addressing some of the transdisciplinary challenges of integrating
bioethics into a
literature and science framework.
Paul Hamann is a Research Associate at the Institute of English and American Studies at the
University of Hamburg, Germany. He recently participated in a research project on genetic
privacy at Vanderbilt University, USA, and is currently finalising a monograph on the genetic
renegotiation of life in the contemporary novel.
39
Bloom’s Science of Seeing: James Joyce and Louis Émile Javal
In the ‘Lestrygonians’ episode of Ulysses, Leopold Bloom encounters a ‘blind stripling’ and
contemplates the nature of perception. He hypothesises that visually impaired people ‘see
things in their forehead perhaps’. Prefiguring Bloom, in The Blind Man’s World: advice to
people who have recently lost their sight (first published in English in 1904), French
ophthalmologist and glaucoma sufferer Louis Émile Javal makes a similar assertion: ‘Most
blind persons state that the principal seat of […] sensation is the forehead’. Via an
exploration of this parallel, and several other intriguing similarities between the two texts,
this paper will posit The Blind Man’s World as a probable intertext for Ulysses.
Studies of visual impairment in Ulysses tend to take one of three approaches: biographical
(drawing upon details of Joyce’s own eye troubles); historical (comparing descriptions of
blindness in Ulysses with cultural mores in early-1900s Ireland); and disability studies
(examining the ways in which disabled characters are treated within Ulysses). Focusing
on The Blind Man’s World provides an alternative approach. Javal’s text, and his wider
studies, bring the phenomenology of the body – via Javal’s lived experience of visual
impairment – into productive dialogue with fin di siècle discussions of impairment and the
science of seeing.
Dr Cleo Hanaway-Oakley is Lecturer in Liberal Arts and English at the University of
Bristol. Her first monograph, James Joyce and the Phenomenology of Film, was published by
Oxford University Press in 2017. She is currently working on a new book-project
provisionally entitled Multifocal Modernism: Literature and Non-normative Vision.
40
The Inheritance of Inequality: Neo-Lamarkism in Margaret Drabble’s The Peppered Moth
This paper argues that Drabble’s novel, which was published around the time of the
completion of the Human Genome Project, expresses considerable unease about the
neo-Darwinian theories which underpinned this project and maps an alternative by drawing
on then-unfashionable neo-Lamarckian ideas. In so doing it opens a perspective which
coheres with the current transition in molecular biology from a neo-Darwinian style of
thought to a postgenomic approach. In particular, the novel resonates with work in
epigenetics (the signature science of postgenomics) which has shown that gene expression
can be modified in response to environmental cues. In this respect, epigenetics frames the
body as, in Jorg Niewöhner’s words, an ‘embedded body, a body which is imprinted by its
own past and by its social and maternal environment, and by evolutionary and
transgenerational time’. Charting the experience of three generations of women across a
period of dramatic social change, Drabble’s novel uncovers the biological dimensions of
social adversity, complicating the standard plot of genetic inheritance and raising questions
about the social production of supposedly natural advantages and disadvantages.
Clare Hanson is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Southampton. Her
research interests are in literature and biology and she is the author of A Cultural History of
Pregnancy (2004), Eugenics, Literature and Culture in Post-war Britain (2012) and Genetics
and the Literary Imagination (forthcoming in 2020).
41
‘We have no use for sterility, for above all things we aim to keep the race going’: Sex,
Gender, and the construction of 'Mother' in Charlotte Haldane’s Man’s World (1926)
As the only one of her novels to receive any significant academic attention, Charlotte
Haldane’s 1926 Man’s World has caused a rift in scholarly opinion regarding its
categorisation as either dystopia or utopia. There are obvious dystopic elements in
Haldane’s text. Set in a future society run by a male scientific elite, the sex of a foetus can be
determined and controlled, allowing for ‘orders’ to be placed depending on the current
needs of the state. As a result, women are divided into ‘neuters’ and ‘mothers’. As genetic
gatekeepers, ‘mothers’ are selected for their physical and psychological ‘superiority’.
However, this means motherhood is afforded state recognition as a vocational role,
recognition that Haldane sought for the 20th century woman. I argue, then, that rather than
trying to apply strict categorisation, this text is best read as a companion piece to Haldane’s
historical and sexological study, Motherhood and Its Enemies, published the following year.
Reading the novel in this context, the reader comes to understand Haldane’s vocational
mother as a figure who is emblematic of the problematic constraints on feminism in the late
19thand early 20th century. Man’s World is conflictingly utopic and dystopic, reflecting a first
wave feminist movement trapped between women’s suffrage and contemporary sexological
and eugenic debates surrounding the biologically ‘normal’ woman.
Allegra Talavera Hartley received her PhD in 2018 from the University of Huddersfield
where she currently lectures in Victorian Literature. Her research focusses on science and
gender in the late 19th and 20th century and she is currently working on the republication of
Charlotte Haldane’s first novel, Man’s World (1926).
42
Radical Ghost Science and the “Real” Tales of Catherine Crowe
Writing 50 years before the serious scientific investigations of the SPR; not concurring with
the proto-psychiatric explanations of Ferriar, Hibbert and Scott (among others), the féted
author and chronicler of “real” ghost tales, Catherine Crowe was seriously out of step with
the male treatment of the supernatural during the Victorian period. Her book, The Night
Side of Nature, published in 1848, details people’s own experiences of the supernatural and
the unexplained. This compendium which comprises of fragmented and multiple narratives,
pushes the limits of the genre of the Victorian ghost story. The work was intended as a call
to science to open its eyes and its perceptions and teased at the rigid conclusions and
assumptions manifested by Victorian science and its male scientists. In her text, Crowe
blends the empirical and the spiritual, the objective and the subjective in a way that
undermines the dominant certainties of empirical vision and masculinity. Crowe expands
and radicalizes the genre of the ghost story, juxtaposing doubt and veracity, claiming
personal inner vision as well as authority. Her tales question Victorian belief systems in a
way that fictionalized ghost stories never can. In her usual indomitable way, Crowe
transgressed gender boundaries and strayed far out of her place as a Victorian woman
writer. And, despite Cox and Gilbert’s assertion that her work “has not worn well” (x), this
paper will suggest that her ghost narratives offer a radical way for us to envision Victorian
culture and beliefs.
Ruth Heholt is a senior lecturer in English at Falmouth University. She has published widely
on the topics of the Gothic, crime, gender and the supernatural. She is currently completing
a monograph on the Victorian writer Catherine Crowe and is editor of the journal Revenant:
Critical and Creative Studies of the Supernatural.
43
The Autonomy and Social Responsibility of Science as reflected in Amitav Ghosh’s The
Calcutta Chromosome
In our presentation we take a look at the novel’s story line about the history of Malaria
research in colonial South Asia during the late 19th century. Regarding the autonomy of
science and against the standard account of the advancement of modern science, the novel
pleas to think twice about the multi-layered role of science in society. In that regard, we
discuss two interpretative angles:
1. A reading of collision avoidance as an indigenous movement redirects colonial
science in order to preserve the local order, culture, and religion.
2. An intersectional reading that considers this subversion of colonial science as an
emancipatory act by local Dalits to overcome their subaltern position within the
social order of the traditional caste system, colonial power, and Western science.
In the first reading, the autonomy of science degrades into social irresponsibility; in the
second, the autonomy of science is used, for right or for wrong, as a weapon against
multiple structures of oppression. We argue that both interpretations shed new light on the
conventional view of an autonomous science as a self-evident component of the “package”
of modernity.
Fabian Hempel is a PhD fellow at the University of Bremen and studies the representation
of the autonomy and social responsibility of science in science novels.
Uwe Schimank is professor of Sociological Theory at the University of Bremen and
co-director of the Fiction Meets Science research programme that explores sociocultural
aspects of science in literature.
44
Richard Jefferies’ Strange Ecologies
In the post-Darwinian period, the place of natural history shifted, and the sites of material
‘enchantment’ and spirituality proliferated. Originally dominated by natural theology, which
sought to prove design and benevolence in nature, and by Newtonian physics, which sought
order and mechanism, natural history in the late nineteenth century was both highly
popular and the site of new and urgent questions of spirituality. As the nature writer,
novelist and natural historian Richard Jefferies (1848-1887) put it, ‘With disbelief, belief
increased.’
With the rise of ecocriticism, and the renewed interest in spirituality and ecology across a
range of disciplines, Jefferies’ work comes into new and important focus. Through focusing
on his natural history works and his memoir, The Story of My Heart (1888), and through
studying the sources of pseudoscience, mysticism, natural history, and his anti-mechanical
‘re-enchantment’ of nature, this paper will explore Jefferies’ strange and challenging
ecologies, and ask what they can offer to both our understanding of the function
post-Darwinian natural history and to contemporary ecocritical theory.
Seán Hewitt is Government of Ireland Fellow at University College Cork. His book, J.M.
Synge: Nature, Politics, Modernism is forthcoming from Oxford University Press. His debut
collection of poetry is Tongues of Fire (Cape, 2020).
45
Astronomy and Literary Modernism in Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker
‘The Great Debate’ of 1920 saw eminent astronomers, Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis
posit very divergent arguments for the size of the universe. Shapley postulated that the
Andromeda Spiral is part of our galaxy, with the Milky Way delimiting the entire extent of
the universe. Conversely, Curtis hypothesised that such spirals were discrete galaxies in their
own right. By the end of the 1920s Curtis would be proven right, with the extent of the
universe expanding to unforeseen dimensions, necessitating new scales of thought to be
attempted.
Germinating over two decades and published in 1937, Olaf Stapledon’s magnum opus Star
Maker is a clear beneficiary of these astronomical debates. Furthermore, with no concrete
characters, minimal plot and an unconventional narrative arc, Star Maker is not only
emblematic of a reconceptualised universe, but also a formidable example of
experimentation in modernist literature. Indeed, the text is only nominally a novel; instead
it may be more accurate to situate Star Maker as an exercise in myth-making, an attempt to
harmonise human destiny with newly gigantic cosmic amplitudes.
So far, there has been a dearth of critical attention to Star Maker’s entanglement of the twin
webs of astronomy and literary modernism; this paper will address this lack.
Rachel Hill has recently completed her MA in Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, University of
London. She is currently an associate research fellow at Strelka Institute for Media,
Architecture and Design, where her research focuses on the contemporary imaginaries of
outer space. She has previously spoken in various conferences and workshops on the
intersection of astronomy, spaceflight, science fiction and ethics. Hill also regularly writes
for publications such as Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction, The
Quietus, Strange Horizons and The Women's Review of Books.
46
“The Interface Organ”: Gravity’s Rainbow, Ivan Pavlov and the Plastic Brain
This paper argues that Thomas Pynchon’s antipathy to the science of Ivan Pavlov has been
overstated, a misreading indicative of the Russian’s repudiation by the West during the Cold
War. Unlike works of high modernism which follow the material world into an immaterial
consciousness, recording as Woolf put it ‘the atoms as they fall on the mind’, Pynchon’s
fiction begins with a material brain and tracks its immaterial representations of the world.
This is not exactly a ‘shift of dominant’ from epistemology to ontology, as Brian McHale
wrote, but a movement towards an understanding of consciousness as the interrelation
between a material brain and its environment. As Gravity’s Rainbow’s working title,
‘Mindless Pleasures’, intimates, the novel is preoccupied with the deadening effects of the
culture industry on the brain, and grapples with the way dual crises of war and
overproduction became opportunities for the capitalization of both the military and the
brain. If, since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collective nightmare of imminent nuclear
destruction has shifted to one of accelerating environmental catastrophe, anxieties about
our cognition and its relationship to the political crisis persist. By encouraging a dialectic
approach to neurological knowledge, Gravity’s Rainbow suggests that only by understanding
our cognitive limitations can we negate them.
Stephen Hills is a third-year PhD student at UCL. His research explores the popular and
intellectual responses to Ivan Pavlov’s science during the twentieth century. Focusing on
Rebecca West, Samuel Beckett, William Burroughs, Anthony Burgess, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o,
and a coterie of British cyberneticists, he argues that empirical representations of the brain
undergirded both new narrative forms and key twentieth-century debates about
nationalism, psychology, cybernetics, linguistics and postcolonialism.
47
‘The ask aches in me’: Ronald Duncan’s Scientific Poetics
In 1961 the poet and playwright Ronald Duncan suffered an emotional collapse. Over the
following decade he rebuilt himself through an intense engagement with science. The result
is his cosmological epic Man, published from 1970 to 1974 in five parts comprising 63 cantos
in total. Unlike earlier scientific epics, Duncan’s poem does not take the findings of science
and fashion them into a narrative or programme. Instead, he seeks to recapitulate within his
poetics the scientific project of continual enquiry in which results are only ever provisional
and inevitably constrained by the limits of the human mind. For Duncan, it was imperative
that poetry should grapple with science in its form and texture as well as its subject matter,
which necessitated in turn a re-evaluation of what constituted poetry itself. In this paper I
will explore his experiments in fashioning a poetics which could incorporate scientific data
and replicate scientific methods, along with his evaluation of the lyric quality of science
itself. I will ask how far Duncan is able to achieve his aim to rejuvenate poetry through
science and how far, if at all, Man offers a resolution to the trauma that beset him.
John Holmes is Professor of Victorian Literature and Culture at the University of Birmingham
and Secretary to the Commission on Science and Literature. His books include Darwin’s
Bards (2009), The Pre-Raphaelites and Science (2018) and the edited collections Science in
Modern Poetry (2012) and The Routledge Research Companion to Nineteenth-Century British
Literature and Science (2017, co-edited with Sharon Ruston).
48
Madness and Medicine: Representations of Mental Illness in Popular Culture
From variations of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) to
representations of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), popular culture is rife with images of
madness and its connections to medicine. My 20-minute presentation will include an
historical context of the literatures of madness connecting the texts to today’s pop culture,
including crossovers with comics a la the 2019 debut of “Batwoman,” whose evil twin calls
herself “Alice” and has rabbit-faced henchman with references to the rabbit hole and all.
The connection between mental health issues and medicine in popular culture will be the
overall focus, showing a trend toward identifying madness as a variation of resiliency (a
disturbing trend that has yet to be addressed in the discourse surrounding it medical
treatment for mental health).
My name is Dr. Rebecca Housel; I’m a NY Times bestselling author and editor for Wiley
(Philosophy & Pop Culture series), as well an author and editor of the Mental Health
for Millennials series (Book Hub; Galway & UK 2017, 2018, 2019). I write, “Survive Anything”
for Psychology Today as well. My Ph. D. is in Medical Humanities and Science Writing with a
B. A. and M. A. in English, Editing, Publishing and a literary focus on Medieval/British
Literature.
49
Mad Scientists and GPs: Agency and Control in Fin-de-Siècle Fiction
This paper compares two recurrent character types in fin-de-siècle fiction: the “mad
scientist” and the mercenary general practitioner. While the former is often obsessive,
hubristic and intellectually idealistic (albeit with horrific outcomes), the latter is
opportunistic, manipulative and practical. Both types are morally detached, and take
advantage of their patients/subjects for personal gain (even if that gain is coupled with a
desire to further scientific knowledge). Eccentric dangerous experimenters (such as Drs
Jekyll and Moreau) tend to be more famous, but the general practitioner and trusted family
doctor was an equally common and often just as sinister character at the fin de siècle,
especially in Gothic and sensation fiction by Florence Marryat and Mary Elizabeth Braddon.
This paper will explore these character types as part of the legacy of Victor Frankenstein (a
scientist who has come to be commonly described as a doctor), and as having evolved from
the Penny Dreadful genre of earlier in the nineteenth century which often featured
surgeons disturbingly eager to acquire fresh corpses for experimentation. It will show how
these stories all reflect cultural anxieties about the growing specialist knowledge and social
power of men of science and medicine, and a perceived lack of patient agency, particularly
in relation to consent.
Helena Ifill is a lecturer at the University of Aberdeen. Her research focuses on Victorian
popular Literature, especially sensation fiction and the Gothic. Her monograph, Creating
Character: Theories of Nature and Nurture in Victorian Sensation Fiction (MUP) came out in
2018.
50
The Intracorporeal Landscape in Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood (1936)
Djuna Barnes's Nightwood insistently pictures the body’s interior – its passages, organs, and
guts – in a celebratory rummage through the bowels of the body. The organs in Barnes'
novel do not stay within their bounds; they are unruly and have agency that extends beyond
the bodies that house them. Barnes revitalises a materialist medical definition of psychic
health and identity through an exploration of the body’s ‘intracorporeal landscape’.
The significance of the body’s interior has been a blind spot in Nightwood criticism.
Dominant readings focus on the surface and the social, arguing that Barnes depicts
grotesque, animalistic, and deviant bodies in order to disturb identity and reject stratified
categories of normal and abnormal. There is more to be said beyond surface
symptomatology. The grotesque does not stop at the surface; the body is turned inside out
in a display of interiority that mocks psychoanalysis through an insistence on physiological
mapping. Barnes brings psychology back to the material body, exploring the manifestation
of emotions and memory as physical landmarks in and amongst the topography of the
organs. This theme dramatises the psyche-soma schism occurring in medicine in the first
few decades of the twentieth century.
Louise Benson James is based at the University of Bristol. She recently submitted her thesis,
‘Hysterical Bodies and Narratives: Medical Gothic and Women’s Fiction, Victorian to
Contemporary’.
51
Deadly Landscapes: Ovid’s Locus Terribilis and Eco-Horror
We are ever more conscious of the natural world as being under threat, victim to human
greed and exploitation. At this moment of acute environmental horror, when the manmade
invasive ecologies that have accompanied colonialism are coming to fruition in strange and
unprecedented ways, why are we seeing so many representations of landscapes that appear
perhaps to be taking revenge, speaking back or refusing human agency? Are deadly
landscapes new, or part of a much longer tradition of representations of vengeful nature
that stretch back to Ovid? If this is so, then what are the earlier cultural conditions that
might lead to such imaginings? How far can we align this moment of environmental disaster
with the indexical rise of cultural representations of extreme violence in sublime locations,
and how far is this on a continuum with the European poetic tradition? How much does this
owe to Ovid’s most striking poetic special effect, the locus terribilis, which uses stunning,
natural locations as the setting for violence? Just as Ovid’s experience of colonial expansion
led to his artistic interest in the locus terribilis, so too contemporary filmmakers and writers
are using similar extended metaphors to explore the intersection of landscape, and
violence.
Laura Joyce (Sheffield). My research is on landscape and violence. My books
include The Museum of Atheism (Salt, 2012), The Luminol Reels (Calamari,
2014), Luminol Theory (Punctum, 2017), and The Ovidian Locus Terribilis in Contemporary
Rural Horror (Bloomsbury, 2021). I currently facilitate a project on burial shrouds at the
Coffin Works Museum, Birmingham.
52
Hours with the Flowers: The Temporalities of Juvenile Gardening in Nineteenth-Century
Britain
Both children and plants grew up in nineteenth-century Britain. Whether via nursery beds or
budding instincts, through taming and training wild natures, or in a final, joyful, flourishing,
horticultural language came to suffuse discussions of juvenile lives and literature, and to
define an influential educational philosophy. At the same time, children across the globe
were being encouraged to become gardeners themselves, with texts such as Jane Loudon’s
My Own Garden: or, The Young Gardener’s Year Book (1855) elaborating how to act as
productive custodians of particular patches of earth. These publications twined together
moral, botanical, and practical lessons, emphasising the myriad opportunities for
educational, healthful, and spiritual development to be uncovered through active work in
the garden. That work had a particular yearly rhythm, as the phases of the horticultural
seasons enforced both cyclical and directional time on childish readers and gardeners. The
parallel processes of personal and actual cultivation exposed tensions between an annual
pattern of germination, growth, efflorescence, fruiting, and setting seed, and the perennial
and inevitable ageing of the children themselves. In the chosen topics of children’s
gardening literature, such as how to make cuttings, prepare soil, when to plant certain
crops, or correctly identify the species in a bouquet, and the literary forms of conversations,
letters, or calendars in which they were presented, authors and illustrators acknowledged
and fought these particular narrative and temporal limits. In this way, as well as contributing
to revised histories of gender, religion, commerce, and empire, horticultural texts provide
illuminating insights into models for and examples of child development. I will use these
elementary gardening books to make three arguments. Firstly, that alongside a
metaphorical use of horticultural language in nascent educational philosophies ran a
practical use of gardening in children’s lives. Secondly, that the particular topic of plants
imposed certain constraints on literary form, narrative development, and the ideologies of
childhood to be found in the juvenile library. And, finally, therefore, that attention to
instructional and botanical works can enrich wider discussions of both the history and
theory of children’s literature and science.
Melanie Keene is Fellow and Graduate Tutor at Homerton College, Cambridge. She is the
author of Science in Wonderland: the scientific fairy tales of Victorian Britain (OUP, 2015).
Her current research projects are on science in juvenile periodicals, on Noah's Arks, and on
elementary anatomy.
53
Who is Science for? Class, Education, and the Victorian Museum
In Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848), Job Legh is one of a ‘class of men’ in the ‘the
manufacturing districts of Lancashire’ who, despite their poverty and lack of formal
education, ‘may claim kindred with all the noble names that science recognises’ (ch. 5). Job’s
natural aptitude for science stands in contrast to the course of study that Mr. Thornton
undertakes in North and South(1854). Though Margaret scornfully wonders ‘What in the
world do manufacturers want with the classics, or literature, or the accomplishments of a
gentleman?’ (ch. 4), these subjects are explicitly positioned as a means of class
advancement for the mill owners of the region. Job and Thornton reflect the wider
conception of science and the arts at the mid-century, embodied in the presentation of
these subjects in the British Museum. The ‘curiosities’ of the natural history collections were
believed to appeal only to the working classes, who sought entertainment not education.
The antiquities, in contrast, were great works of art which appealed to the ‘higher feelings’
of the upper classes. This paper will consider the way the sciences and the arts were
positioned in terms of class and education at the mid-century, just before the radical shift
that came with Darwin’s Origin.
Jordan Kistler is a lecturer in Victorian Studies at the University of Strathclyde. She is
currently working on a cultural history of the British Museum across the nineteenth century,
exploring questions of access, organisation, and the construction of knowledge during this
period.
54
Franziska Kohlt - Abstract to follow
Fran Kohlt is a postdoc at the University of York and doctoral thesis was on dreams and
visions in Victorian fantastic literature and psychology. Her interests lie in the sciences of the
mind and (comparative) literature, visual culture and the fantastic, and she has published
articles on Lewis Carroll & Victorian Psychiatry, and Carroll’s science-nonsense and the
Victorian stage.
55
Literature and Science Policy: The Curious Case of Artificial Intelligence
Recent research has established a number of links between literature, science and policy,
namely that science fiction narratives inform the public understanding of science, the public
understanding of science shapes public perceptions of science, and that science policy is
reflective of popular ideas (McLeod, 2010; Cave et al, 2018; Perry and Uuk, 2019). However,
there is little understanding of the holistic relationship linking narratives and science policy
more directly. This research seeks to understand the relationship between narratives and
science policy. Artificial intelligence (AI) technology is selected as a case study for examining
this relationship due to the abundance of both narratives about AI in both literature and
film, and, since 2016, the proliferation of AI policies globally. By analysing a model dataset of
twenty global AI policies to determine if and how narratives about AI are integrated into the
policy discourse, this paper suggests that science fiction narratives both inform AI policy and
shape the discourse around AI within it.
Tonii Leach is a PhD student in the Centre for Computing & Social Responsibility at De
Montfort University, Leicester. She is also a Research Assistant on the Global AI Narratives
project, within the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at the University of
Cambridge. Her research focus is AI policy, narratives and discrimination.
56
Colonial Romance and the Epistemologies of Extinction in W.H. Hudson's Green Mansions
As the extinction of signature species like the Dodo, the Passenger Pigeon, or the Tasmanian
Tiger shows, the current crisis of biodiversity is intertwined with the history of European
colonialism. Colonialism caused overexploitation and the destruction of habitats, spread
invasive European species, and restructured colonial landscapes. Moreover, the rise of the
scientific discourse of extinction, itself contingent on a new conception of geological time
and on the emergence of uniform taxonomic systems, does not only historically coincide
with the height of European colonialism, they are also conceptually intertwined. Emergent
discourses of species extinction overlapped with colonial discourses of cultural and linguistic
extinction that apply the principles of biological taxonomy to the social world. The analogy
of species and cultures as distinct, self-enclosed, and stable epistemological units was
foundational to how Europeans understood indigenous cultures, and in discourses of
“endangered” cultures, it continues to structure our thinking even today. My paper will use
a close reading of William Henry Hudson's romance Green Mansions (1904) to explore the
ambivalent fascination of colonial discourse with extinction. In the portrayal of its doomed
romantic object, the native girl Rima, the novel conflates biological, cultural, and linguistic
extinction, whilst also justifying genocidal violence against native populations in the name of
conservation. Extinction thus emerges as a highly malleable, but also highly ambivalent
trope that is both legitimizing and subverting colonial authority and European narratives of
progress. My larger argument is that a close analysis of the function of extinction in colonial
discourse not only helps us to understand the colonial roots of the current crisis of
biodiversity, but also questions the utility of extinction to frame cultural and linguistic
processes in a globalized world.
Karsten Levihn-Kutzler studied English and Drama-, Film and Media Studies in Frankfurt and
Southampton, UK. After completing his PhD-thesis on representations of global risks in
contemporary Anglophone fiction at the University of Frankfurt, Karsten Levihn-Kutzler
recently joined the Research Cluster “Fiction Meets Science” at the University of Oldenburg,
where his current research focusses on transcultural interactions in Anglophone fictions of
science. His research interests also include contemporary Anglophone literatures, the
relation of literature and globalization, postcolonial theory, and environmental criticism.
57
“How can we alter the crest and the spur of the fighting cock?”: Julian Huxley, Popular
Biology, and the Feminist Pacifism of Virginia Woolf
The paper takes as its starting-point a letter written by Virginia Woolf in 1940 which
speculates about the possibility of ending war. ‘Can we change sex characteristics?’ Woolf
asks. ‘How can we alter the crest and the spur of the fighting cock?’. In writing this letter,
Woolf is recalling a passage she read in 1932 from the biological textbook The Science of
Life, co-written by Julian Huxley: a passage which, in Woolf’s terms, describes a ‘hen that
became a cock or vice versa’. The paper demonstrates that Woolf’s writing of this period,
particularly Three Guineas and Between the Acts, responds to Huxley’s works of popular
biology, specifically their discussion of secondary sex characteristics, hormones, and the
instability of biological sex, in order to envision a way out of the repeating cycle of violent
domination that she traces in contemporary society, and to conceive of a future society not
built upon a binary model of gender. This is not to suggest, however, that Woolf’s feminist,
pacifist politics are passively influenced by Huxley. On the contrary, Woolf challenges the
conservative aspects of Huxley’s books, specifically their promotion of eugenics, and their
insistence on pathologizing those who stray outside the gender binary.
Catriona Livingstone. I was awarded my PhD in 2018 by King’s College London, for a thesis
on Virginia Woolf, science, and identity. My work is published or forthcoming in the Journal
of Literature and Science, The Year’s Work in English Studies and Woolf Studies Annual. I
co-organized the 2017 BSLS Winter Symposium.
58
Uncertainty, Exactitude, and Risk: AI Narratives in Singapore
AI narratives in Singapore are part of a literary tradition—that has its roots in
Romanticism—of writers who are horrified by the exact and valorise an ontology of
uncertainty. Their depictions of AI tend to focus on hive minds, singularities, and grids that
homogenise culture and efface the individual. As citizens of a postcolonial nation,
Singaporean writers often weave the language of imperialism into their narratives in order
to conceptualise and warn against the potential effects of an autonomous superintelligence
on human culture and society. As a thinly-veiled critique of technocratic forms of
governance, these narratives suggest that quantification is incompatible with critical
reasoning and warn against increasing degrees of mathematical exactitude which leave no
room for the uncertain and the incomplete.
AI appears as the latest in a long line of instrumental approaches that seeks exactitude
through abstraction while its practitioners declare themselves free from ideology, fantasy,
and emotion. What Steven Connor calls the “ideology of number” proclaims that number is
exact while the realm of the word, the tone and the gesture is imprecise. Whereas literary
writers tend to deride exactitude as inhuman and laud imprecision as a vital component of
the human condition, Singaporean AI narratives often complicate this binary by showing the
ways in which attributes typically deemed intrinsic to humans can be found within the
machine. However, such an approach also suggests its opposite: that numbers are not
simply oppositional to but constitutive of the human. Overall, I argue that Singaporean AI
narratives seek to protect the particular, the anomalous, and the minute from the tyranny
of number but in doing so they actually re-couple numbers to the human.
Graham Matthews is Assistant Professor in English at Nanyang Technological University,
Singapore. His most recent book is Will Self and Contemporary British Society and his work
on contemporary literature has appeared in leading journals including Modern Fiction
Studies, Textual Practice, Journal of Modern Literature, Critique, English Studies, and
Literature & Medicine. He is currently writing a monograph entitled The Hardware of
Culture: Science and Technology in Mid-century British Literature.
59
Eyes, Ears, and Information: A New Reading of Claude Shannon's The Mathematical
Theory of Communication
In this paper I offer an experiment in bringing book history, biography, new materialism,
new media studies, and literary criticism to bear on one of the most influential science texts
of the twentieth century, Claude Shannon's The Mathematical Theory of Communication.
This text gave us the concept of "information," now used in almost every field of inquiry
from quantum physics and molecular biology to digital humanities. I start with the book's
genesis in an obscure technical journal, and show how it was reframed by several
intermediaries, Warren Weaver a Rockefeller Foundation director whose beliefs about
which sciences were significant had a lasting impact on developments in genetics and
communications, the nuclear scientist Louis Ridenour, and eventually a literature professor,
Wilbur Schramm, who facilitated its actual publication as a book by University of Illinois
Press. Schramm is known today as the founder of both the Iowa Writers Workshop, the first
major creative writing programme, and mass communications studies. I show that Schramm
and Weaver's interest in Shannon was partially provoked by their own personal pathologies
of speech and hearing. I conclude with analysis of the rhetorical implications of Shannon's
decision to reframe older terms for communicative effectiveness as information. My hope is
to demonstrate that literature and science studies can throw new light on recent history of
science from within an emerging synthesis of literary analysis and innovative methodologies
in media theory and studies of material culture.
Peter Middleton. I am now Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Southampton.
I have published books and essays on modern poetry, have a book of essays on poetry
authorship due to appear from University of New Mexico Press in 2021, and am currently
working on a genealogical history of the code concept.
60
Re-Imagining British Women in Science –Mary Anning, Caroline Herschel, and the Feminist
Politics of the Contemporary Biographical Novel
Paleontologist Mary Anning (1799-1847) and astronomer Caroline Herschel (1750-1848)
have both recently been elected by the Royal Society in London as two of the ten “most
influential women in British science history”. While Anning impressed the scientific
community of her time with her ‘eye’ for fossils unearthing, among others, the first
complete skeletons of ichthyosaurus and plesiosaurs, Herschel directed her eyes towards
the sky discovering no less than eight comets and becoming the first woman paid for her
work in science. Anning’s and Herschel’s scientific struggles and successes have not only
fascinated historians and biographers, but have most recently inspired novelists to
re-imagine their lives within the genre of biographical fiction. This paper will provide
feminist readings of Tracy Chevalier’s Remarkable Creatures (2009) and Joan
Thomas’ Curiosity (2010), two novelistic portraits of Mary Anning, as well as Carrie
Brown’s The Stargazer’s Sister (2015) and Kelley Swain’s Double the Stars (2014), two
fictional depictions of Caroline Herschel. Focusing on the artistic reconstruction of these
female scientists’ achievements and comparing the different approaches taken by the
authors in telling these women’s life stories, I seek to reveal the ambiguous feminist politics
within these contemporary biofictional returns to women in British science history.
Christine Müller is a research and teaching assistant in English Literary Studies at the
University of Bremen. Her PhD project which is entitled “Rewriting the History of Science
from a Feminist Perspective? Female Scientists in Contemporary Biographical Fiction”
focuses on the literary representation of the lives of historical women in science.
61
‘Most Securely Held’: Marine Attachments in Eliot
This paper will examine the presence of marine attachments (claws, roots, tentacles) in T. S.
Eliot’s writing in relation to the author’s reading of biological texts by Charles Darwin, E. W.
Macbride, and Geoffrey Tandy. In his reading, as well as his writing, Eliot’s imagination
appears to have been particularly drawn to the prehensile powers of marine organisms,
finding himself, to quote ‘Preludes’, ‘moved by fancies that are curled | Around these
images, and cling’.[1] Recent work in the ‘Blue Humanities’ has emphasised the ways in which
the sea unsettles dominant epistemologies, dissolving our terrestrial sensibilities and
reconstituting the human subject in a liquid element. In the writing of Eliot, I will argue, it is
possible to uncover an alternative set of meanings attached to the sea and its living
inhabitants – namely those which relate to the idea of attachment itself. By focusing on
entities that have been able to gain a foot-hold (or a starfish arm-hold) in turbulent waters,
Eliot found in marine life a curious strength and purchase on the surrounding world quite
unlike the feeble grasp of human subjects.
Rachel Murray is a research fellow at Loughborough University. Her research specialises in
modernism, literature and science, and the environment. She has published articles on
James Joyce and bees and Samuel Beckett’s worms – the latter of which won the 2016 BSLS
Early Career Essay Prize. Her book, The Modernist Exoskeleton: Insects, War, Literary Form,
is forthcoming with Edinburgh University Press.
[1]‘Preludes’, T. S. Eliot: The Complete Poems and Plays (London: Faber and Faber, 2004), 23.
62
Shared Pasts, Shared Futures: Reading Sustainability in George Henry Lewes and George
Eliot
In the second volume of his extensive work, The Problems of Life and Mind (1875), George
Henry Lewes exposes the histories of sublimation that even the most quotidian aspects of
life depend on. He writes: ‘who, on descending to breakfast, and finding the well-prepared
table, gives a thought to the invention, the energy, the misery which during millions of years
have been working to that result?’ Lewes pays tribute to ‘the plantations in China, the
factories of Sheffield, the potteries of Staffordshire’ but does not neglect to acknowledge
the ‘milch-cow’ whose small production of milk necessary to sustain a calf is ‘exaggerated
into the forty pints daily for the nourishment of several families’. This paper contributes to
current critical work on nineteenth-century literatures of sustainability and, as Lewes
indicates, the relation of commodified parts to the ecological – and globalised – whole. As
Regenia Gagnier has recently emphasised, the dialectic between globalism and localism is
fundamental to future work in Victorian studies, and indeed to conceptions of ourselves
today (2018). This paper shows how Lewes’s twin pillars of historicity and individuality, as
deployed in both Problems of Life and Mind and in George Eliot’s final published work, The
Impressions of Theophrastus Such (1878), continue to define understandings of how human
and animal actants contribute to and are threatened by such networks.
Dr Harriet Newnes has recently finished a PhD at Lancaster University. Her
monograph, Facing the Animal: Physiognomy and Pathognomy in the Long Nineteenth
Century, is currently under review with Cambridge University Press. She teaches at
Lancaster and is a book reviews editor for the BSLS.
63
‘This will not be a funny book’: Humour, Complexity and The Curious Incident of the Dog
in the Night-time by Mark Haddon
Humour is given short shrift early in Curious Incident in a passage warning readers of the
absence of jokes in the novel: ‘I cannot tell jokes because I do not understand them’.
Warning is immediately comically undercut as the child narrator dissects a joke with
misplaced forensic precision in terms of linguistic outsourcing ‘has three meanings’ and
cognitive processing of incompatible meanings ‘making the word mean the three different
things at the same time’. Understanding ricochets in and out of the fictional world as it
hurtles among the narrator’s technical bravado, its framing as social gaffe and amused
cringing in readers who ‘get’ the joke.
This paper addresses the play of comic and cognitive interactions in the novel by combining
textual analysis with a complexity approach that draws on the neuroscience of humour. I
argue that comic effects in the novel are driven by entanglement and perturbations.
Humour entangles other literary devices in the novel as well as cognitive processes and
cultural discourses beyond the novel. Entangled interactions perturb each other, leading to
continual interpretive collisions and divergences. As interpretation, understanding
relentlessly morphs through the dynamics of entanglement and perturbations.
Irene O’Leary is an external PhD candidate in literary studies at James Cook University,
Australia. Her research interests include literary dynamics, complexity theories, fiction and
writing techniques. She is also working on the wicked problems of style and elegance (i.e.
staying on) in her longboard surfing.
64
Golding’s “Gaia novel”: A Case Study of James Lovelock’s Influence on the Work of William
Golding
This paper will argue that William Golding, the mid to late twentieth-century author
and Nobel laureate best known for his Lord of the Flies (1954), intended to write a novel
heavily based upon the Gaia hypothesis, propounded by his friend, James Lovelock.
Golding’s biographer, John Carey, has previously argued that this novel, entitled ‘Here be
Monsters’, is an early version of Darkness Visible (1979) [1], which has no explicit connection
to Lovelock or Gaia. I make the case that ‘Here be Monsters’, although closely related
to Darkness Visible and other creative projects, was, at one stage, a discrete concept with
explicit connections to Lovelock and his hypothesis. In this paper, I will attempt to tease out
the principal strands in its complicated development.
Lovelock has repeatedly acknowledged his debt to Golding in suggesting the name
‘Gaia’ for his hypothesis, that the Earth is an emergent, self-regulating system, analogous to
a living organism, which has co-evolved with its biological inhabitants. [2] However, this
represents the first sustained examination of Lovelock’s influence on Golding’s work,
drawing on unpublished drafts and notes held at Special Collections at the University of
Exeter. These materials reveal the impact of Lovelock’s hypothesis on Golding’s imagination.
[1] John Carey, William Golding: The Man Who Wrote Lord of the Flies (London: Faber &
Faber, 2010), p. 315.
[2] For example, in James Lovelock, The Ages of Gaia (Oxford: OUP, 2000), p. 3.
Bradley Osborne is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Exeter and the recipient
of the William Golding PhD Studentship, jointly sponsored by the university and the estate.
His research draws on the unpublished materials held in Special Collections, including drafts
and notebooks. No full-length study of Golding’s work has thus far made use of these
materials.
65
'A woman's thoughts signifies little': Subversive Rhetoric as Self Promotion in Mary Trye's
Medicatrix, or The Woman Physician
In 1675, against the backdrop of what Steven Shapin calls ‘silent technicians’, or
‘undocumented’ contributions by women to early modern science, a book
entitled Medicatrix, or the Woman Physician by Mary Trye was printed. Although Mary Trye
is often briefly mentioned in works that discuss female medical practitioners or the plague
pamphlet war that followed the 1666 outbreak, Trye’s skilful use of rhetoric and printing
conventions has yet to be thoroughly examined. Medicatrix captures the scathing and
passionate (sometimes even humorous) voice of an early modern female Doctor who used
gender rhetoric, plague rhetoric, interpretations of Christian duty/charity and
evidence-based medicine against her father's detractors. This paper examines the
sophistication of Medicatrix’s language and argues that Trye successfully inverts negative
gender types regarding women’s intellect and sensibilities to launch a scathing attack on
Galenic, licensed medicine. Through feigning inferiority as an unlearned and grieving
daughter, Trye establishes an anti-rhetoric rhetoric which supports the chymists cause,
highlights the illogical nature of Galenic regimens, and positions herself as the natural heir
to her father’s medical practice.
Kate Owen has recently completed an MA at King’s College London in Early Modern English:
Texts and Transmissions. During her studies she has become interested in how early modern
scientific knowledge was disseminated and how this has affected meaning and transmission.
She also volunteers at Barts Hospital Museum and Archive.
66
‘Would That all Mechanics Could Write as Well’: Encouraging, Generating and Managing
Correspondence in Technical Periodicals of the 1820s
In Britain between 1822 and 1825, at least seven new periodical publications (including the
Mechanics’ Magazine) were established for engineers, artisans and mechanics. The role of
periodicals in the development and transformation of nineteenth-century science has come
under increasing scrutiny in recent years. However, within that scholarship investigations
into the function of engineering and technical literature are under-represented. The new
technical periodicals of the 1820s offered commercial potential and gave editors the
opportunity to build credibility and status that could support other careers, such as patent
agency, engineering consultancy, technical authorship or teaching. In this paper, I will
explore the almost universal aspiration among those editors to include reading audiences in
the production of their publications. Frequently this was a result of needing ‘free’ copy or in
the hope of generating sensationalised debate, but in some cases there was a genuine
desire amongst editors to improve the writing style of British mechanics such that their
correspondence could ‘do honour to any work’. By comparing the attempts that different
editors made to include their readers in their productions, this paper will demonstrate the
variety of ways in which editors of these new publications encouraged, educated and
managed their correspondents.
Ellen Packham is a third-year PhD candidate at the University of Aberdeen, supervised by Dr
Ben Marsden and Prof Ralph O’Connor. Ellen’s project investigates the literary habits of
British engineers between 1750 and 1900, focusing on the periodical publications developed
by, and for, communities of engineers and mechanics.
67
“What is the meaning of this intrusion?”: ‘The Adventure of the Dying Detective’ (1913),
‘Oyster Typhoid’, and Medical Posthumanities
Though Sherlock Holmes stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle does not feature much of John
Watson’s medical career, “The Adventure of the Dying Detective” (1903) takes Watson’s
medical knowledge and authority seriously. The emphasis on the role of Watson as a doctor
in this case reveals the challenge against medical authority, within the wider socio-cultural
frameworks. “The Dying Detective” plays with the use of medical metaphor of germ theory
with the intrusion of the Empire, and vice versa. Though the story reveals the restoration of
imperial order and medical authority, the story has played with the role of sympathy, which
can be extended to the nonhuman world, where the germs and the oysters which Holmes
raves about in his pretended delirium belong. As the paper discusses the text in the context
of “Oyster typhoid scare” at the fin de siècle, it hopes to look at the text under the light of
postcolonialism and medical posthumanities, as Lucinda Cole suggests, in order to unveil the
state of the Anthropocene, redefine “zoonotic diseases”, and discuss ethical challenge
concerning human-nonhuman entanglements.
Ming Panha receives scholarship from Thammasat University, Thailand to study his PhD in
English literature at University of Sheffield. He is working on pet dogs, domestic spheres,
and the British Empire in Sherlock Holmes fictions by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. He is also
interested in late nineteenth-century gender activist author and their representation of the
nonhuman world.
68
Automaticity: From Physiological Property to Literary Device
French poet André Breton proclaimed Surrealism to be '[p]ure psychic automatism'. In an
attempt to access the 'superior reality' of the automatic thought, nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century artists developed techniques of automatic writing, drawing, and painting,
in which they strove to become spectators of their own subconscious, and to act as
automatic, passive vessels for its creative force. The growing interest in the role of
automaticity in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature was paralleled by
contemporary progress in the understanding of the central role of automaticity in human
physiology. A key contributor to this understanding was the discovery and characterisation
of the autonomic nervous system, which was shown to carry out physiological functions that
are essential for survival entirely automatically, that is, beyond wilful control. As French
physiologist Claude Bernard observed, a significant implication of this discovery was a new
conception of human nature as seemingly 'free and independent', whilst in reality relying
on automatism.
Drawing from Breton's and Bernard's respective observations, in my paper I will examine
automaticity as literary device in the light of automaticity as physiological mechanism. I will
suggest parallels between the discovery of automaticity as an evolutionarily adaptive
physiological property that liberates the organism from the necessity to apply conscious
control to ensure its own survival (for example by autonomously maintaining breathing,
heartbeat, and all other life-sustaining functions without requiring conscious effort), and the
re-interpretation of automaticity as an aesthetic device that liberates the individual from
logical and rational thought, and, through metaphors, juxtapositions, non-linear narratives,
and free associations, enables access to creative avenues not normally available to the
conscious mind.
Alessia Pannese (University of Oxford) trained in law (Laurea, University of Rome 'La Sapienza'), veterinary medicine (Laurea, University of Perugia), veterinary science (MPhil, University of Cambridge), neurobiology and behaviour (PhD, Columbia University), and literature and arts (MSt, University of Oxford). She has held fellowships at Institutes for Advanced Studies in New York, Paris, Delmenhorst (Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg), and London.
69
"The revolting mass": The Speciation and Maiming of the Mining Body in the Nineteenth
Century
This paper will consider the representation of the mining body in nineteenth-century
Cornish mining fiction, focusing on the speciation and maiming of the body. Cornish
particularism is recurrently articulated through the difference of the mining body, with
Cornish miners represented as shorter, stronger, and otherwise specifically adapted to the
subterranean environment. Mining capability is often depicted as hereditary or 'in the
blood'. This contributes to the othering of the Cornish, and the establishment of the Cornish
as both technologically advanced yet simultaneously primitive. The Cornish body is further
rendered distinct through images of the maimed miner - the use of explosives meant that it
was not uncommon to see blind former miners missing their fingers or hands. This will be
considered within a wider context of the dehumanised industrial body with the rise of
industrial capitalism. Cornwall is a particularly pertinent case study as its industry was
collapsing at the same time industry was flourishing elsewhere, providing a 'warning story'
for the end of industrial progress.
Joan Passey is a Teaching Associate at the University of Bristol. She was awarded her PhD in
2019 which focused on establishing a Cornish Gothic tradition in the long nineteenth
century. She is currently working on her monograph and developing postdoctoral research
on health at sea in Victorian literature.
70
On the Wings of The Pegasus: Creating and Sustaining a Creative Writing and Narrative
Medicine Organization
Founded in 2008 by Dr. Hans Steiner and Dr. Irv Yalom, the Pegasus Physician Writers at
Stanford now have over 120 active members. Housed under the Medicine & The Muse
Program of Medical Humanities at Stanford University--this organization--comprised of
medical undergraduates, trainees and faculty, has expanded to include sustained writing
critique groups, curated readings and symposiums, and ongoing educational seminars
designed to promote the emergent creative writing endeavors of physicians. This paper will
describe the methodology, resources utilized, and challenges in sustaining this vibrant
community of physician authors in the areas of medical humanities, narrative medicine,
poetry, nonfiction, and long form fiction within an academic setting.
Jennifer Pien is a physician, affiliated Clinical Assistant Professor at Stanford University, and
author of the forthcoming debut novel Lost in Tiananmen. She is the Associate Director of
The Pegasus Physician Writers as well as the Editor-In-Chief of The Pegasus Review.
71
Trickstering the Nuclear Sublime
One of the most significant compilations of post-nuclear poetry to be published in recent
years is John Bradley’s anthology Atomic Ghost: Poets respond to the Nuclear Age (1995).
Bradley compiles poems by authors from around the world and writing at different stages of
the post-modern post-nuclear era and in response to nuclear anxiety. However, the many of
the poems have been criticised for their treatment of the bomb as a sublime and
universalising force. The forces (both physical and political) at work in the explosion are too
terrible to put into words. Russel Brickley connects this failure of language to the concept of
the sublime, a fear-infused encounter with a monumental force beyond the capacity of the
individual to describe. In contrast, Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Plutonian Ode’, included in the Atomic
Ghost anthology, sets itself apart from its neighbours. The Ode describes an encounter with
the nuclear sublime, but rather than flinching from the vision, Ginsberg challenges the
threat of sublimity in order to more dynamically fulfil the purpose of political protest.
The treatment of the bomb as a sublime and universalising force only serves to augment
nuclear anxiety, without providing means of resistance or survival in post-nuclear culture.
My paper will overview two of Ginsberg’s most famous poems, ‘Howl’ and ‘Plutonian Ode’,
as writings that seek to challenge the nuclear sublime. In doing so, I will draw upon my
research of Ginsberg’s engagement with the quantum trickster; that is discourse
surrounding trickster figures in literature and their association with the principle of quantum
physics in post-nuclear poetry. My paper will explore the potential for the quantum trickster
to act as an anti-nuclear, and therefore decolonial, agent of resistance and survival.
Felicity Powell is a final year PhD researcher at the University of Sheffield, UK. Her research
explores the physics of post-nuclear tricksters in twentieth century texts.
72
Dissociative Depersonalisation and the Perspectives of Modernism
This paper will examine how the experiments with narrative perspective that characterise
literary modernism can inform psychological and psychiatric understandings of dissociative
depersonalisation. The 2013 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders defines
dissociative depersonalisation as an experience of unreality and detachment from one’s
‘mind’, ‘self’, ‘body’, or ‘surroundings’. The concept has held a prominent place in
psychiatric discourse since it was coined at the end of the nineteenth century (by Etienne
Dugas), but it has rarely been discussed in the Humanities disciplines, or in relation to
literary writing. Given that depersonalisation is commonly known as an ‘as if’ experience
that stretches its subject’s capacity for simile and metaphor, this paper suggests that literary
studies has much to add to the psychological study of depersonalisation. In particular, it will
argue that careful consideration of the work of D.H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield and
Samuel Beckett can help nuance an understanding of how one can continue to participate in
life without feeling as if ‘they’ are ‘quite there’.
Josh Powell is a Lecturer in the English Literature department at Cardiff University. His
doctoral thesis focused on Samuel Beckett’s relationship with experimental psychology, and
a monograph based on this project will be published in January 2021 as part of
Bloomsbury’s Historicizing Modernism series. He has recently published articles in the
Journal of Literature and Science and Philip Roth Studies, and his latest article, which
focuses on the writing of Ann Quin, is forthcoming with Textual Practice.
73
Body Knowledge: Self-Experiment in the 18th Century
This paper will evaluate the rhetorical and persuasive strategies applied in natural
philosophical texts of the eighteenth century that present the observer’s body as the site of
knowledge that can be extracted through processes of self-experimentation and
manipulation such as tasting, inhaling or probing. Famous cases of this process are visible
towards the end of the century with Humphry Davy’s inhalation of gases and Alexander von
Humboldt’s (and others’) galvanism of his own sensory organs. This paper will consider
examples from the first half of the century to offer some initial ideas about the relationship
between examples of self-experiment – in which the scientist’s own body is understood as a
measurable object and an instrument in its own right – and the construction of scientific
authority. I will present brief examples from three broad areas: self-measurement in articles
by Joseph Wasse and William Beckett, the habitual use of taste to identify elements and
compounds in cases from Philosophical Transaction, and investigations of of eye probing by
Isaac Newton, William Porterfield, and David Hartley to show how the products of
self-experiment are presented as evidence both for the body’s unseen processes and for the
workings of the external world.
Ros Powell is a lecturer in English at the University of Bristol. She recently completed a book
manuscript on analogy in eighteenth-century literature and science.
74
Fact and Fiction in Dante's Description of Hell: A Geological Approach to Inferno XII-XV
Dante’s interest in science has often been considered by scholars, that underlined his wide
knowledge of classical astronomy. A minor effort has been devoted to Dante’s interest in
nature. In fact, in the Commedia Dante often focuses his interest on natural phenomena,
using them as examples for the description of Hell landscapes, or as metaphors. A detailed
analysis of some cantos, depicting landscapes usually attributed to the Poet’s fantasy,
reflects a thorough direct observation of natural phenomena, probably in the light of
environmental knowledge as it was being constructed by contemporary Authors. This can
be noticed, for instance, in the Cantos XII-XV of the Inferno, in which the fiction built by
Dante’s fantasy in deeply interwoven with Dante’s nonfictional knowledge of geothermal
phenomena, such as mofettes.
Mofettes, natural geothermal emissions of sulphur gases and carbon dioxide, have seldom
been described by ancient geographers. Sometimes, they have been used in classic poetry
(by Virgilius, above all) as a metaphor for chthonian world, in consequence of their strange
and frightening features. In spite of their relative low frequency, they have attracted the
attention of Albert the Great and Ristoro D’Arezzo, that explained them in accordance with
Aristotheles theories on the formation of wind. There is consensus about the fact that
their works were known by Dante, but his detailed description of some natural phenomena,
never described by classical Authors, suggests a thorough direct observation of
geomorphology.
Antonio Raschi, born in Firenze, Italy in 1955.
Since 1982 he works at the National Research Council (CNR).
Since 1990 he worked on ecosystems response to climate change and to elevated
concentrations of greenhouse gases, and on the ecosystems surrounding gas vents in
geothermal areas.
From 2009 to 2019 he has been Director of the CNR Institute of Biometeorology.
75
“The most scientific and poetic production that ever came from the pen”: Erasmus Darwin
and the Problem with Philosophical Poetry
This paper will examine the “philosophical” poetry doctor-poet Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802)
alongside responses to his work in the Romantic era press. Like other radical men of science
in the late 18th century, most notably Joseph Priestley, Darwin’s writing, which combined
poetic form with detailed scientific subject matter and notes, was seen, and consequently
attacked, by some as demonstrating a mechanist or materialist philosophy associated with
atheism and pro-revolutionary ideals. Much critical attention has been given to the
character of these attacks. In this paper I argue that Darwin attempts to obscure the
political implications of his science by using purposefully oblique language and in doing so
he creates a space which allows contemporary criticisms of language and poetic style to
segue into concerns over ‘scientific’ accuracy. I argue that this, in turn, situates Darwin’s
writing within contemporary debates about the relationship between Science and Poetry
and the propriety of writing which borrows from, and draws connections between, both of
these increasingly distinct categories.
Alice Rhodes is a third year PhD student in the Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies at the
University of York. Her thesis, titled "'Mechanic Art and Elocutionary Science': Speech
Production in British Literature, 1770s-1820s", investigates physiological approaches to
speech in the work of Erasmus Darwin, John Thelwall and Percy Shelley.
76
Out of Date: Genetics and Historical Fiction
During the final decades of the twentieth century a whole generation of British writers fell
under the spell of evolution. This sea-change in the British novel was entwined with the
popular rise of neo-Darwinism and the steady flow of speculative science publications by
evolutionary biologists and psychologists such as Richard Dawkins, E. O. Wilson, and Steven
Pinker. Pursuing a reductionist account of human behaviour which united evolution and
genetics with neuroscience, books like Dawkin’s The Selfish Gene promoted an explanation
of the mind as the brain, and the brain as an evolved organ, determined by natural
selection.
In this paper, I consider the particular relationship between genetics and the historical novel
during this period. Following on from studies of the neo-Victorian novel (e.g. Shuttleworth,
1998), I argue that contemporary historical fictions are similarly drawn to issues surrounding
the ‘real’, ‘factual’, and ‘authentic’; making them fitting vehicles for addressing the
seductive lure of contemporaneous genetic materialism. Taking A. S. Byatt’s Babel Tower
(1996) as my case study, I show how Byatt uses her fictional exploration of classical 1960s
genetics as an analogue with which to critique the alarming ascent of genetic determinism
during the not-so-distant era of the novel’s own publication.
Natalie Riley is a PhD candidate and teaching assistant at Durham University. Funded by the
Wellcome Trust, her project explores mind science in the contemporary novel. She has
written for The Polyphony and Journal of Literature and Science, with publications in Glyphi
and BMJ: Medical Humanities forthcoming.
77
‘Two tablets good, four tablets better:’ Reading and Writing Literature in the British
Medical Journal
This paper examines how contributors to the contemporary British Medical Journal discuss
literature and use literary techniques in their submissions. Such disparate texts as Anthony
Burgess’ The Doctor is Sick, George Orwell’s Animal Farm, Gustave Flaubert’s Madame
Bovary, and Marian Keyes’ Rachel’s Holiday are discussed or alluded to in the pages of
the BMJ, and I argue that the healthcare professional reads literature that can reveal
complex truths about their vocation. By analysing contributors’ creative efforts I conclude
that clinicians use the act of writing to understand human factors in medical treatment. I
consider how physician-writers use medical knowledge to inform their writing. I also
highlight how creative fiction and nonfiction writing helps the clinician to describe and
purge the horror of past and present medical treatment, and express anxieties about the
dystopian future that seems to be on the horizon from within the tenuous landscape of the
contemporary National Health Service.
Jessica Roberts completed her PhD on Romantic-era medicine and periodicals at the
University of Salford before joining the National Health Service (NHS) as an educator and
course facilitator, and now she is working in medicines safety. She has published on
contagious politics in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine and teaching literature and history
of medicine in the NHS. She continues to be interested in the pedagogy and scholarly study
of literature, science, and medicine.
78
Dr. Jekyll’s Cheval Glass and the Turn to Psychopharmacology in British Fiction
While the Victorians did not yet have concepts of drug action and drug effects (notions from
psychopharmacology, what the field is called from 1920 onwards), the developing
professionalization of medicine in the 1880s coincided with a growing chemical
understanding of the way particular substances work on the brain and the body. In light of
recent work in literature and science and in the medical humanities, in particular research
that has demonstrated the impact of Brunonion medicine in the first half of the nineteenth
century, this paper will provide a counter-intuitive reading of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in
order to propose that several details in the novel gesture to a readership that would have
had some understanding of drug effects, and this is achieved by evoking chemistry as a
distinct discipline. Usually read as a narrative about addiction, I will reframe this novella as a
text that subtly proposes (and regularly hints at) a psychopharmacological – and chemical –
theory of the brain (and body) that is acted upon (and acts) in a particular way through
chemical agents, which become embodied in the dual character of Jekyll/Hyde.
Dr. Natalie Roxburgh is Lecturer in English at the University of Siegen, where she is writing
her Habilitationsschrift/postdoctoral thesis on rethinking aesthetic disinterestedness in
nineteenth-century Britain. She is author of Representing Public Credit (Routledge 2016) and
has published essays in Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Mosaic, and elsewhere. She is co-editor
of Psychopharmacology in British Literature: 1780-1900, forthcoming in the Palgrave Studies
in Literature, Science and Medicine Series.
79
The Science of Life and Death in Frankenstein
Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein emerged from a climate of fear. As scientific knowledge
increased and new resuscitation techniques were widely reported by the Royal Humane
Society, the public worried that the boundary between life and death was not as definite as
had been thought. There was a real concern that doctors could not tell with any precision
when very ill people were alive or dead. Members of the public worried that they might be
buried alive or their corpses stolen from their graves for use in medical experiments. This
paper will show how Shelley capitalised on the uncertainty caused by new scientific and
medical ideas of life and death.
Professor Sharon Ruston is Chair in Romanticism at Lancaster University. She has co-edited
the Collected Letters of Sir Humphry Davy for Oxford University Press (2020) and is currently
writing a trade book for the Bodleian Library Press called The Science of Life and Death in
Frankenstein (2021).
80
‘There is no one we are more charmed with than Liebig’: George Eliot, G.H. Lewes and
Agricultural Chemistry
When George Eliot and George Lewes toured Germany in 1858, the agricultural chemist
Justus von Liebig made a particular impression on them both. Diaries and letters detail how
they discussed science and literature while spending time in Liebig’s laboratory and sharing
in his experiments. This paper reads Eliot’s ‘Natural History of German Life’ (1856) and
Lewes’s ‘Realism in Art: Recent German Fiction’ (1858) alongside Liebig’s Familiar Letters on
Chemistry (1851) and ‘Induction and Deduction’ (1865). I demonstrate that Eliot develops
her early theory of “inductive” realism through an engagement with soils and chemistry,
interests she shares with Liebig; I also argue that Liebig found Eliot’s and Lewes’s thoughts
on literary realism formative as he sought to negotiate tensions between deductive and
inductive science in nascent agricultural chemistry. This intellectual relationship offers a
case-study in how ideas were discussed across and between the arts and sciences in the
mid-nineteenth century, developing in a state of dynamic interrelation to form an ecology of
knowledge-production. My paper concludes by offering this ecological method of reading
literary and scientific writing as a methodology with which to negotiate tensions inherent to
existing knowledge-frameworks within the field of Literature and Science.
Jim Scown is a PhD student at Cardiff University and the University of Bristol. His
work investigates the relationship between soils and literary realism. He examines fictional
and scientific explorations of earth, dust, mud and sewage from 1840 to 1880, considering
how Victorian understanding of British soils relates to the development of ecological
science.
81
Physiology and Pathology in Wilkie Collins’s Legacy of Cain and George Gissing’s Nether
World
In his Physiology and Pathology of Mind (1867) Henry Maudsley describes how the mind
functions by making “internal adjustment[s] to external impressions” (6), an activity of
which we are often not aware; indeed, as Maudsley goes on to say, “this [the mind] does at
first without consciousness, and this it continues to do unconsciously more or less
throughout life” (15). This idea of human consciousness as moderated by both its internal
and external environments is borrowed from, in particular, Alexander Bain, Herbert
Spencer, Thomas Laycock, and William Carpenter. Maudsley goes further than his
nineteenth-century contemporaries, however, in his contention that disturbances in
behaviour, such as insanity or criminal conduct, are due to two related phenomena: morbid
biology and failure to adapt to one’s environment.
This paper considers two late-Victorian novels, Wilkie Collins’s Legacy of Cain (1888)
and George Gissing’s Nether World (1889) in relation to nineteenth-century psychology’s
understanding of the internal/social divide. As degeneration theory gained traction in the
second half of the century and attention shifted to social issues (such as poverty, crime,
education, and health), fears about both inherited moral degeneracy and diseased societies
proliferated. While Legacy of Cain appears to support heredity theory in its depiction of
criminality, Nether World considers slum life and social adaptation as predictors of crime;
yet these works also complicate, following Maudsley, this internal/external divide. In so
doing, Collins and Gissing threaten notions of criminal responsibility as well as the legal
fiction of the “reasonable man.”
Rebecca Sheppard is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English Language and
Literatures at the University of British Columbia. Her interdisciplinary work explores how the
Victorian criminal became a crucial locus for contemporary engagements with larger ethical
concerns regarding human action and responsibility. She is funded by the Social Sciences
and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
82
The Mysteries of Experience: Ann Radcliffe’s Critique of Experimentalism
In Ann Radcliffe’s novels, the difference between appearance and truth, sensation and
reality, is constantly emphasized: things always “seem” but rarely are, characters frequently
do “not comprehend” what they see, and even the narrator can only say that events
“probably” happened one way or another. Such stylistic tics, I argue, are only the most
obvious manifestations of a broader Radcliffean experiential epistemology, one central to
how later Gothic novels treat their “mysteries” and which indexes long-simmering
discomforts with experimentalist objectivity. On the one hand, Radcliffe proceeds with a
skepticism that seems evocative of scientific empiricism, an exaggeratedly “modest
witnessing” which reports only what is apparent. But, on the other, Radcliffe does not place
her faith in an experimentalism of witnessed, repeatable, and describable events mediated
by objective instruments. Instead, lone characters experience singular events that elude
standard methods of description, and, most importantly, they must grapple with their
bodies’ limitations as sensing instruments. Radcliffe’s emphasis on the embodied nature and
aesthetic dimensions of experience became an important resource for later Gothic fiction,
making the Gothic a rallying point for an epistemology of experience against that of
experiment.
Alex Sherman is a PhD candidate in English literature at Stanford University. He researches
the eighteenth century English novel in relation to mathematics, with a focus on geometry
and spatial intuition.
83
Scientific Rhetoric and the Aesthetics of Possibility in Contemporary Utopian Fiction
The re-emergence of utopian thinking in speculative fiction marks a shift away from the
longstanding dominance of dystopian writing within the genre, with authors such as Kim
Stanley Robinson returning to a utopianism that is not situated within hard science fiction.
But the challenge of utopia – the conflict between idealism and reality – is encapsulated in
the derivation of More’s term, which combines eutopia (good place)
with outopia (no-place). In an era following what Fukuyama described as the ‘end of
history,’ marked by the inability to ‘imagine a world substantially different from our own,’
how can sf broaden conceptions of what is possible to encompass utopia?
Taking Robinson’s 2017 novel New York 2140 as a case study, this paper argues
for an aesthetic of possibility in contemporary speculative fiction, marked by the assertive
use of scientific rhetoric to align the fictional world with rationalized reality. This rhetorical
strategy works with the novel’s setting, a version of New York City at once familiar and
defamiliarized, to present a political utopianism that is simultaneously based in abstraction
and recognizable particularity. Robinson’s work thus reasserts the power of individual
agency and collective action in a striking example of recent sf’s advocacy for radical
possibility.
Harry Smith is an MSt student in Comparative Literature and Critical Translation at the
University of Oxford. Their work currently focusses on environmental science-fiction, and
changes in the representation of fascism in contemporary Anglophone and German media.
84
Letters to Marianne: Madness, Liberty and Proto-feminist Protest in Jane Austen’s Love
and Friendship (1790)
Over the last thirty years an analytical problem has arisen within Austen studies. From John
Wiltshire to Jason Daniel Tougaw, scholars have insisted that Jane Austen’s depictions of the
lunatic and hypochondriac are derisive, entertaining and politely divorced from comment on
the rights of men and women. Austen’s knowledge of neural medicine, the revolution in
psychotherapeutics and of protest literature written by the mad have been overlooked.
Advancing Heather Meek’s assertion that interdisciplinarity must play a central role in
understanding the discourses of nervous disease, this paper will reveal a sympathetic
Austen aware of cultural and medical languages of madness. Helen Small and Michelle
Faubert explore how contemporary depictions of madness often sexualised and silenced
women. Yet, for Austen, madness is transgressive and enfranchising. This paper will examine
letters, medical treatises and poetry alongside Jane Austen’s Love and Friendship (1790). It
will argue that the novella’s depiction of madness was influenced by the unsettled political
climate of 1788-89, its love-mad woman’s “fits of frenzy” expressing disillusionment with
sexual difference and preserving women’s health through protest and activity.
Consequently, Austen will be presented as a proto-feminist using discourses of madness to
endorse liberty, equality and the survival of the sorority.
Becky Spear. I have a BA Hons (University of Glamorgan) and an MA (Cardiff University) in
English Literature. I am writing up my PhD at Cardiff University, having started my research
at the University of Westminster. My thesis examines Jane Austen's interactions with
eighteenth- and nineteenth-century science and medicine.
85
Baroque Science and Plain Style: Barlow’s Magnetical Advertisements (1618) and Ben
Jonson’s Magnetic Lady (1632)
My paper takes its cue from Ofer Gal and Raz Chen-Morris who have argued in their seminal
study Baroque Science (2013) that Baroque science was born out of "the human
enforcement of mathematical order on a messy nature” (184). As Sven Dupré has noted in
his review of the book in Early Science and Medicine 19, 4 (2014), scholarship on stylistic
aspects of science is long overdue. And yet, despite this wake up call, questions regarding
scientific styles are still marginalized. My paper seeks to explore the poetics of science, and
aligns early modern poetics with the reception and translation of Gilbert’s De Magnete.
Opting for plain style when appropriating Gilbert’s Latin treatise, Barlow’s Magnetical
Advertisements (1618) does not only fend off anxieties about an ostensibly occult nature of
magnetism, it also echoes the poetics of his time. These poetics stress the ‘plain and honest’
nature of English (in particular in comparison with Latin which, of course, always smelled
suspiciously of Roman Catholicism), and in doing so they lay the ground for the emergence
of ‘disinterestedness’ in the eighteenth and ‘objectivity’ in the nineteenth century. If we
wish to understand how these categories at the heart of modern science came into being,
we must consider stylistic choices at around 1600. In keeping with Bruno Latour’s
observation that discipline formation is the unfinished project of modernity, my paper
scrutinizes how ‘making plain’ became a driving force for what we call the ‘rise of science’.
With these perspectives as a framework, I will read Barlow’s treatise and Jonson’s play from
the vantage point of early modern poetics and argue that ‘Baroque Science’ is not a hollow
epochal marker but a productive concept at the crossroads of literature and science.
Felix Sprang, Professor of English, studied English, Biology, and Philosophy and received his
PhD for a dissertation on scientific thought in early modern England that was largely
conceived as Aby Warburg Scholar at the Warburg Institute, London. He is now based at the
University of Siegen, Germany.
Link: https://www.uni-siegen.de/phil/anglistik/mitarbeiter/sprang_felix/index.html?lang=de
86
Faithful to the Original – Issues of Intervention and Authenticity in Publishing Goethe’s
Theory of Colour
Despite having been continually derided for over two hundred years since its first
publication, Goethe’s Theory of Colour shows a remarkable resilience in terms of published
books. There are at least six different English language versions of the main “Didactic
Section” of Goethe’s theory that are currently available in print. However, various problems
in the publishing process have thwarted Goethe’s theory since the first edition of 1810. This
presentation will explore issues ranging from editorial timidity to the author’s use of
language to translation into English to colour printing techniques to publishing rights. This
specific example regarding the communication of Goethe’s theory in published form raises
many general issues about the process of making scientific literature available.
Malin Starrett is an independent researcher in areas relating to science and technology.
Since 1996, he has been regularly presenting workshops and lectures about Goethe’s Theory
of Colour, writing articles, designing a colour science experimenting kit and carrying out new
experimental research in the science of colour.
87
Symbiogenesis and the Human Microbiome as Collage: What is Videodrome?
Collage is a powerful mode of creation in many media, and also a productive theoretical lens
with which to view all sorts of things. I’ve developed a comprehensive theory of collage that
depends on three specific criteria. They are the gap, the seam and contested space. The first
collage, on this planet at least, was likely the creation of a new type of single-celled
organism about 3.5 billion years ago called eukaryotes. Called symbiogenesis, it has all the
hallmarks of collage.
The human microbiome is another interesting collage. As biologist Jan Sapp writes “A new
understanding of life is emerging today, one in which organisms are conceived of as
multigenomic entities, comprising many species living together. We are genetic and
physiological chimeras. We did not just evolve from bacteria, we have evolved with them....”
Research has suggested that human psychology is influenced by microbes within our
digestive system.
All of this has surprising relevance to the 1982 film Videodrome written and directed by
David Cronenberg. The main character can be seen as a symbiogenetic evolutionary
advancement who is controlled via techno-biological entities inserted into his gut.
Dennis Summers has exhibited artwork in a wide range of genres and media internationally
for over 30 years. His work is in the collections of several museums including MOMA, and
the Pompidou Center. Much of his artwork has been crafted using collage strategies. He is
the Arts Liaison for SLSA.
88
Making Up the Mesozoic; or, Dinosaurs, Worldbuilding, and the Fantasy of Earths Past
It is common to refer to dinosaurs as having inhabited ‘another world’, but the literal truth
of the statement is not always appreciated. With continents, animals, plants, and even the
moon and stars all unrecognisable, Mesozoic Earth (c.250-65mya) is hard to imagine –
harder, of course, since the fossil evidence we have of it is so fragmentary.
And yet we do imagine it. With varying levels of rigour, science and fiction have both been
attempting to visualise this landscape – one no human ever saw – for at least the last two
centuries. My contention in this paper is that we learn something about both literature and
science if we understand them as collaborators rather than enemies in the continual
reconstruction of this ancient world.
Science’s view of the Mesozoic is constantly updating, and literature too has produced
numerous visions – some more plausible than others – of Earth’s deep past. By
understanding science’s efforts as analogous to the ‘worldbuilding’ done by sci-fi authors, I
argue that we might also find a scientific worldview in the most spuriously trashy sci-fi
performances. I focus in particular on the work of John C. McLoughlin, a zoologist and
illustrator who also wrote two sci-fi novels in the 1980s.
Will Tattersdill is communications officer for the BSLS, author of Science, Fiction, and the
Fin-de-Siècle Periodical Press (2016), and co-editor of a recent special issue of Configurations
(26:3, Summer 2018) on the state of the Two Cultures debate. He is currently writing a book
about dinosaurs and the popular imagination.
89
‘Leave some for the Naïads and the Dryads’: Environmental Consciousness in Juliana
Horatia Ewing’s Stories and Poems
And after a time a new race came into the Green Valley and filled it; and the stream which never failed turned many wheels, and trades were brisk, and they were what are called black trades. And men made money soon, and spent it soon, and died soon; and in the time between each lived for himself, and had little reverence for those who were gone, and less concern for those who should come after. And at first they were too busy to care for what is only beautiful, and after a time they built smart houses, and made gardens, and went down into the copse and tore up clumps of Brother Benedict’s flowers, and planted them in exposed rockeries, and in pots in dry hot parlours, where they died, and then the good folk went back for more; and no one reckoned if he was taking more than his fair share, or studied the culture of what he took away, or took the pains to cover the roots of those he left behind, and in three years there was not left a Ladder to Heaven in all the Green Valley.[1]
In Juliana Horatia Ewing’s ‘Ladders to Heaven’ (1877), the Green Valley, once exploited,
soon changes into a Black Valley, allegorizing mankind’s thoughtless use of natural
resources. Addressing the issue of the environmental consequences of industrialization,
‘Ladders to Heaven’ does not simply represent the dangers of industrialization by featuring
lost natural worlds threatened by extinction because of pollution and massive urbanization;
it also provides readers advice to prevent the loss of biodiversity. As will be argued in this
paper, through her stories and poems, Juliana Horatia Ewing revamped the environmental
ethics advocated by Georgian children’s writers (Sarah Trimmer, Anna Laetitia Barbauld,
Hannah Moore, etc.), inviting juvenile audiences to reflect further, think about future
generations and never collect nor ‘grub’ too much so as to leave ‘some for the Naïads, some
for the Dryads, and a bit for the Nixies, and the Pixies’.[2] As will be shown, her writings
encouraged young readers to engage with their environment, leading to the founding of a
‘Parkinson Society’ aimed at ‘search[ing] out and cultivat[ing] old garden flowers which have
become scarce’ and ‘try[ing] to prevent the extermination of rare wild flowers, as well as of
garden treasures’.[3]
[1] Juliana Horatia Ewing, ‘Ladders to Heaven’, Dandelion Clocks and Other Tales (London: SPCK, n.d.), pp. 50–55, pp. 53–4. [2] Juliana Horatia Ewing, ‘Grandmother’s Spring’, Verses for Children and Songs for Music (London: SPCK, c.1895), pp. 63–9. [3] Horatia K. F. Gatty, ‘Preface’, in Juliana Horatia Ewing, Mary’s Meadow and Letters from a Little Garden (London: SPCK, c.1886), n.p. Laurence Talairach is Professor of English Literature at the University of Toulouse Jean Jaurès and associate researcher at the Alexandre Koyré Center for the History of Science and Technology. Her research interests cover medicine, life sciences and English literature in the long nineteenth century.
90
‘What becomes of the broken hearted?’: Metaphor, (Post)human Bodies and Power in
Literary Accounts of Cardiac Surgery
This paper approaches the Posthuman through representations of heart surgery in
contemporary writing, in which challenges to the parameters of the human demonstrate
the experiencing self’s entanglement with multiple bodies, processes and material agencies.
Metaphors of the heart in Western culture position it as the site of feeling, character and
emotion, meaning that literary encounters with cardiac surgery necessarily engage with
ways of being. This paper reads such encounters to ask: what happens to the idea of self
when not only does a surgical procedure disrupt the boundary between apparently interior
and exterior environments, but foreign matter agentially reshapes or replaces critical parts
of the human body? The transplanted part of the heart disrupts essentialist definitions of
the body in physical terms – categories such as genetics, species or the organic no longer
adequately constitute boundaries between self and other, and such insights critique
established power dynamics including those relating to race, class and gender. Surgical
interventions reveal how all bodies are always already entangled with other selves and
other matter, where matter is ‘a dynamic and shifting entanglement of relations, rather
than as a property of things’ (Karen Barad). They also suggest that if ‘Nature’ is an ‘artificial
construct’ (Timothy Morton), so too is the concept of the ‘natural’ human body.
Dr Emma Trott is working on a one-year Wellcome Trust-funded fellowship in the School of
English at the University of Leeds, exploring metaphor and heart disease in contemporary
literature and film. Her most recent publication is a short essay titled ‘On Ken Smith’s Heart’
in Stand. Her PhD was on the ecopoetics of Simon Armitage and Jon Silkin and she is
interested in the dialogues and crossovers between the environmental and medical
humanities.
91
Sentient Symphony: Life as a Category of Knowledge in the Popular Science Narratives of
Lynn Margulis
In this paper, I examine how American biologist Lynn Margulis (1938-2011) mobilizes the
concept of "life" in order to articulate complex ideas about Gaia Theory and Endosymbiosis
Theory in evolutionary biology for a general audience. With over a dozen popular science
titles (often co-authored with her son Dorion Sagan) published alongside scientific books
and articles aimed at a specialized audience, Margulis was able to communicate her
biological ideas to both a general audience and to highly specialized scientific communities.
I argue that one of the key strategies Margulis employed in her popular science works was
to bring complex ideas "to life" by emphasizing how biological matter behaves in animate,
vital, autopoietic ways. I pay special attention to the role of metaphor and narrative
structure in the inception and consolidation of Gaia Theory, developed in collaboration with
British chemist and environmentalist James Lovelock (b. 1919), and in Margulis’s
memoir Symbiotic Planet: A New Look at Evolution (1998). I mobilize actor-network theory
as proposed by Bruno Latour and the vital materialisms of Jane Bennett to critically engage
with narratives and metaphors of living matter according to Lynn Margulis, highlighting how
the playful use of language, imagery, and literary devices function as key strategies for
disseminating biological knowledge and democratizing science.
Sofia Varino is a cultural historian focusing on language and embodiment in the life sciences
across North American and European historical contexts. She is currently a postdoctoral
researcher at the Center for Transdisicplinary Gender Studies at Humboldt University in
Berlin. Her research has appeared in Somatechnics, European Journal of Women’s Studies,
and Women’s Studies Quarterly, among others. Her dissertation Vital Differences:
Indeterminacy & the Biomedical Body was published in 2017. She holds a Ph.D. in
Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies with a certificate in Art & Philosophy from Stony
Brook State University of New York.
92
The Strange Case of Dr. Stevenson and Mr. Nabokov
The fourth chapter of Vladimir Nabokov: Lectures on Literature (1980) focuses on Robert
Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886). Nabokov suggests
that Stevenson derives the name Hyde from the word hydatid. The zoological definition of
hydatid, states Nabokov, “is a tiny pouch within the body of man” that “contain[s] a limpid
fluid with larval tapeworms in it”—and, as Stevenson’s tale confirms, Hyde is “Jekyll’s
parasite.” Somewhat strangely, however, Nabokov immediately withdraws his suggestion,
claiming “Stevenson knew nothing of this” (182).1 The present paper discounts this
volte-face. For, while living in Hyères, during the summer of 1884, Stevenson’s wife “Fanny,
always a home physician and now avid to be up to date about medicine for her husband’s
sake, subscribed to The Lancet,” and soon suspected that “Louis’s salads” were “full of
tapeworms’ eggs” (Margaret Mackay 187).2 That autumn, with cholera threatening Hyères,
the Stevensons fled to England. Here, Robert revealed the personal and scientific strands of
his recent parasitic encounters, a legacy that would underwrite his Strange Case: “I have
been detected in the felonious possession of many yards of tapeworm,” he informed a
friend in October 1884. “’Tis a strange world” (152–53).3
1 Vladimir Nabokov, Vladimir Nabokov: Lectures on Literature (1980).
2 Margaret Mackay, The Violent Friend: The Story of Mrs. Robert Louis
Stevenson (Doubleday, 1968).
3 Robert Louis Stevenson, R.L.S.: Stevenson’s Letters to Charles Baxter (1973).
Dr Michael Wainwright is Honorary Research Associate with the English Department at
Royal Holloway. His monographs include Darwin and Faulkner’s Novels: Evolution and
Southern Fiction (2008), Game Theory and Minorities in American Literature (2016), and The
Rational Shakespeare: Peter Ramus, Edward de Vere, and the Question of Authorship (2018).
93
Scientific Words-in-freedom: Mina Loy and John Rodker
For a decade or more after T. S. Eliot's 'The Metaphysical Poets' (1921), the dominant model
for the use of science in English-language modernist poetry was the seventeenth-century
conceit. But prior to Eliot's revival of the 'metaphysicals', there were other viable
practices. In 1899, Arthur Symons had influentially noted Jules Laforgue's use
'colloquialism, slang, neologism, [and] technical terms' in his poetry. In the period
1910-1914 the Italian Futurist F. T. Marinetti had advocated the investigation of
the 'inhuman' qualities of matter ('Technical Manifesto', May 1912), and, while he was
concerned that 'molecular life' should not be introduced into poetry as a 'scientific
document' ('Wireless Imagination', May 1913), his encouragement of unexpected analogies
gave a place for scientific vocabulary in poetry.
The present paper will consider the place of scientific vocabulary in the poetry of John
Rodker and Mina Loy. Loy, resident in Italy 1907-1916, was closely associated with several
futurist writers. Though more closely associated with the Vorticist movement than
the futurists, Rodker wrote The Future of Futurism (1927) in the To-Day and To-Morrow
series. This paper will attempt to understand their methods of using scientific terminology
and images closely associated with science: in Rodker's case, terms such as 'light-cones',
'osmoses', and 'sphygmogram'; in Loy's, terms such as 'infusoria' and 'radium.' Do such
terms imply a larger structure of ideas -- a submerged conceit -- or are they being used in
other ways?
Michael H. Whitworth is the author of Einstein’s Wake: Relativity, Metaphor and Modernist
Literature (2001), and other articles and chapters on literature and science. He is Professor
of Modern Literature and Culture at the University of Oxford and a Tutorial Fellow at
Merton College, Oxford.