Searching out Science and Literature
Hybrid Narratives, New Methodological Directions, and Mary Russell Mitford's Our Village
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12880536 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Amy M King (St. John's University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2007 |
| Volume | 4 |
| Issue | 5 |
| Pages | 1485-1503 |
| Publication date | 2007-08-28 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Literature Compass (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1741-4113 • E-ISSN: 1741-4113 |
| Publisher | Wiley (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2007.00488.x |
| OpenAlex | W1971176311 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 13 |
The findings from the fields of book history, and in particular from the SciPer project, are implicitly asking nineteenth‐century scholars of literature and science to rethink their relation to the text: literally, from book to periodical. Nineteenth‐century literary studies has long been involved with the ways in which science and literature share and transmit ideas between the two. What we perhaps have done less of is think through the various ways that we may not have been able to identify certain texts as either literary or scientific. Here I will concentrate on the example of Mary Mitford's popular sketch series Our Village: Sketches of Rural Life and Scenery (1824–32) as a text that invites this kind of inquiry; it also illustrates how examining text originating in the periodical press can reconceptualize and broaden what we have come to think of as the scientific. The text's hybridity is based in its heterogeneity – that in part it is literary, in part it is natural history. This essay attempts to think about Mitford through the challenge of the SciPer project's invitation to search out non‐specialist forms of scientific discourse within periodical formats. The essay proposes new methodological and conceptual directions for early nineteenth‐century literature and science studies, focusing in particular on the residual popular form of natural theology as it presents in popularized natural history modes. Our Village is proposed not as the exception but rather as a methodological pointer to possible new directions in early nineteenth‐century literature and science studies. In making the periodical press and the various narrative forms we will find there more front and center in our inquiry, might we find more of these odd hybrids that are neither and yet somehow both science and literature? And in so doing, will we begin to revamp some of the stories we tell ourselves about the interrelation of science and literature in the early Victorian moment
Art · Epistemology · Literature · Narrative · Natural (archaeology · Relation (database · Sketch · Sociology · Australian Indigenous Culture and History · Computer Science · History · History of Science and Natural History · Philosophy · Publishing and Scholarly Communication
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |