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.