Victorian Interdisciplinarity and the Sciences

Rethinking the Specialization Thesis

Bernard Lightman, Efram Sera-Shriar, Bernard Lightman,Efram Sera-Shriar

• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Year: 2024
• ISBN:
  9780822991335
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Science History
• Index: History

The specialization thesis—the idea that nineteenth-century science fragmented into separate forms of knowledge that led to the creation of modern disciplines—has played an integral role in the way historians have described the changing disciplinary map of nineteenth-century British science. This volume critically reevaluates this dominant narrative in the historiography. While new disciplines did emerge during the nineteenth century, the intellectual landscape was far muddier, and in many cases new forms of specialist knowledge continued to cross boundaries while integrating ideas from other areas of study. Through a history of Victorian interdisciplinarity, this volume offers a more complicated and innovative analysis of discipline formation. Harnessing the techniques of cultural and intellectual history, studies of visual culture, Victorian studies, and literary studies, contributors break out of subject-based silos, exposing the tension between the rhetorical push for specialization and the actual practice of knowledge sharing across disciplines during the nineteenth century.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction. Rethinking Disciplinary Specialism in Victorian Sciences
• Part I. Between Disciplines
• Part II. Synthesizers
• Part III. Practices and Displays
• Part IV. Reluctant Collaborations
• Part V. Hybrid Fields
• Afterword. “Withness” and Victorian Scientific Conversations
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Notes on Contributors
• Index