Nineteenth-century men of science aligned scientific practice with moral excellence as part of an endeavor to secure cultural authority for their discipline. Anne DeWitt examines how novelists from Elizabeth Gaskell to H. G. Wells responded to this alignment. Revising the widespread assumption that Victorian science and literature were part of one culture, she argues that the professionalization of science prompted novelists to deny that science offered widely accessible moral benefits. Instead, they represented the narrow aspirations of the professional as morally detrimental while they asserted that moral concerns were the novel's own domain of professional expertise. This book draws on works of natural theology, popular lectures, and debates from the pages of periodicals to delineate changes in the status of science and to show how both familiar and neglected works of Victorian fiction sought to redefine the relationship between science and the novel.
• Engages with current issues in literary studies alongside debates in the history of science • Presents fresh readings of canonical texts and rediscovers neglected novels • Proposes a new methodology for studying the relationship of literature and science
Contents
Introduction; 1. The religion of science from natural theology to scientific naturalism; 2. Moral uses, narrative effects: natural history in the novels of George Eliot and Elizabeth Gaskell; 3. 'The actual sky is a horror': Thomas Hardy and the problems of scientific thinking; 4. 'The moral influence of those cruelties': the vivisection debate, antivivisection fiction, and the status of Victorian science; 5. Science, aestheticism, and the literary career of H. G. Wells; Epilogue.
Printer friendly version