6. Taking the Brake Off

Abstract

To a graduate student in the mid-1990s, the so-called ‘theory wars’ of the previous couple of decades seemed no longer especially relevant. Instead, there was an array of innovative interdisciplinary approaches that, while evidently underpinned by theoretical insights, also allowed a greater sensitivity to history and material culture. Perhaps because these methods were relatively new, having emerged only in the previous decade, they didn’t necessarily cohere, or mutually reinforce each other. For those, like me, working on nineteenth-century literature, there were two particularly exciting new ways of analysing and expanding our canon of texts, and understanding their relation to the broader contexts of the period. The first was what Stefan Collini has called the ‘sub-field or “interdiscipline”’ of ‘science and literature’, which had come to fruition, in the early 1980s, in the subtle analysis of the mutual influence of scientific and literary texts pioneered by Gillian Beer and then continued...