Abstract
Science was everywhere in Victorian culture, and it can often be found right on the surface of some of the period’s most frequently taught novels and poems. Using a range of examples, from “Dover Beach” to Dracula, this chapter describes a variety of methods for introducing students to interdisciplinary approaches to the study of literature and science, giving special attention to the topics of Darwinian evolution, representational technologies, and scientific racism. Suggested activities include close analysis of scientific texts, images, and artifacts; a trip to the library where students can explore popularizations of science in nineteenth-century periodicals; and an interdisciplinary research project connecting analysis of Victorian literature and science to broader critical conversations of continuing importance to our twenty-first-century world.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Works Cited
Amiel, Jon, director. Creation. Recorded Picture Company/BBC Films, 2008.
Arnold, Matthew. “Dover Beach.” In Dover Beach and Other Poems, 86–7. New York: Dover, 1994.
———. Literature and Science. In Literature and Science in the Nineteenth Century, edited by Laura Otis, 6–8. Oxford: OUP, 2002.
Beddoe, John. The Races of Britain: A Contribution to the Anthropology of Western Europe. Bristol: Arrowsmith, 1885.
Beer, Gillian. Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction. 2nd edition. Cambridge: CUP, 2000.
Byatt, A.S. Morpho Eugenia. In Angels and Insects: Two Novellas. New York: Viking, 1994.
Carroll, Samantha J. “Putting the ‘Neo’ Back into Neo-Victorian: The Neo-Victorian Novel as Postmodern Revisionist Fiction.” Neo-Victorian Studies 3, no. 2 (2010): 172–205.
Chevalier, Tracy. Remarkable Creatures. New York: Dutton, 2009.
Clayton, Jay. “Literature and Science Policy: A New Project for the Humanities.” PMLA 124, no. 3 (2009): 947–9.
Collins, Wilkie. The Moonstone, edited by John Sutherland. 2nd edition. Oxford: OUP, 2008.
Darwin, Charles. The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. In Darwin: A Norton Critical Edition, 3rd edition, edited by Philip Appleman, 175–254. New York: Norton, 2001.
———. On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. In Darwin: A Norton Critical Edition, 3rd edition, edited by Philip Appleman, 95–174. New York: Norton, 2001.
DeMello, Margo. Animals and Society: An Introduction to Human-Animal Studies. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009.
Doyle, Arthur Conan. The Sign of Four, edited by Shafquat Towheed. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 2010.
Eliot, George. “The Lifted Veil.” In The Lifted Veil and Brother Jacob, edited by Helen Small, 1–44. Oxford: OUP, 2009.
———. Middlemarch, edited by David Carroll. Oxford: OUP, 2008.
Hayles, N. Katherine. “Constrained Constructivism: Locating Scientific Inquiry in the Theater of Representation.” In Realism and Representation: Essays on the Problem of Realism in Relation to Science, Literature, and Culture, edited by George Levine, 27–43. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993.
———. “Information or Noise? Economy of Explanation in Barthes’s S/Z and Shannon’s Information Theory.” In One Culture: Essays in Science and Literature, edited by George Levine and Alan Rauch, 119–42. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987.
Kemmerer, Lisa A. Sister Species: Women, Animals, and Social Justice. Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2011.
Knox, Robert. The Races of Man: A Fragment. Philadelphia: Lea & Blanchard, 1850.
Lombroso, Cesare. Crime: Its Causes and Remedies (1899), translated by Henry P. Horton. Boston: Little, Brown, 1911.
Martin, Emily. “The Egg and the Sperm: How Science Has Constructed a Romance Based on Stereotypical Male-Female Roles.” Signs 16, no. 3 (Spring 1991): 485–501.
Nordau, Max. Degeneration (1892). London: William Heinemann, 1898.
Nott, Josiah Clark, and George Robert Gliddon. Indigenous Races of the Earth. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1857.
O’Connor, Ralph. The Earth on Show: Fossils and the Poetics of Popular Science, 1802–1856. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008.
Otis, Laura, ed. Literature and Science in the Nineteenth Century. Oxford: OUP, 2002.
Shapin, Steven. Never Pure: Historical Studies of Science as if It Was Produced by People with Bodies, Situated in Time, Space, Culture, and Society, and Struggling for Credibility and Authority. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010.
Stevenson, Robert Louis. Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. 3rd edition, edited by Martin A. Danahay. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 2015.
Stoker, Bram. Dracula, edited by Glennis Byron. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 1997.
Tarantino, Quentin, director. Django Unchained. Weinstein Company/Columbia Pictures, 2012.
Taylor, Jenny Bourne, and Sally Shuttleworth. Embodied Selves: An Anthology of Psychological Texts, 1830–1890. Oxford: Clarendon, 1998.
Tennyson, Alfred, Lord. In Memoriam A. H. H. (1850). In Tennyson’s Poetry, edited by Robert W. Hill, Jr., 203–91. New York: Norton, 1999.
Wells, H.G. The Time Machine, edited by Nicholas Ruddick. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 2001.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2017 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Kuskey, J. (2017). Teaching Across Disciplines: Victorian Literature and Science. In: Cadwallader, J., Mazzeno, L. (eds) Teaching Victorian Literature in the Twenty-First Century. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-58886-5_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-58886-5_6
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-58885-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-58886-5
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)