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21 The Victorian Novel and Science
Get accessJonathan Smith is William E. Stirton Professor of English at the University of Michigan-Dearborn. He has published numerous works on Victorian literature and science, including Charles Darwin and Victorian Visual Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2006) and Fact and Feeling: Baconian Science and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (Wisconsin University Press, 1994). He is also the editor, with Piers Hale, of Negotiating Boundaries (Pickering and Chatto, 2011), volume 1 of Victorian Science and Literature. His essay on ‘The Victorian Novel and Science’ appeared in The Oxford Handbook of the Victorian Novel (Oxford University Press, 2013).
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Published:16 December 2013
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Abstract
The essay traces the presence of science and scientists in the Victorian novel, and the relationships between science and the novel in methodology, cultural status, and literary form. It argues that we must think not in terms of “science” and “the novel,” but of sciences and novels. While natural history and especially Darwinism and its implications were the major scientific presences in the novel, Victorian fiction responded to and appropriated many other sciences. Novelists and scientists professionalized and gained greater cultural authority during the period, and they shared many approaches in their depictions and narrations of the natural and human worlds. Although the conjunction between the practices of scientific naturalism and literary realism and literary naturalism are well established, non-realist forms also had scientific analogues, scientists laid claim to the imagination, and novels both shaped and were themselves shaped by new scientific understandings of reading and perception.
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