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The Palgrave Handbook
of Twentieth and
Twenty-First Century
Literature and Science
Edited by
The Triangle Collective
Palgrave Handbooks of Literature and Science
Series Editor
Howard Marchitello
Department of English
Rutgers University–Camden
Camden, NJ, USA
This series of handbooks is devoted to the study of the rich and complex his-
tory of the relationship between literature and science, from medieval times
to the present moment. While this is a topic not unknown to literary criti-
cism (especially in the middle years of the 20th century), the work assembled
in these five volumes represents a fundamentally new approach to the vital
story of the interconnectedness of literature and science, an approach that is
grounded firmly upon an understanding of the status of both literature and
science as discourses dedicated to the production of knowledge.
More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15721
Neel Ahuja · Monique Allewaert ·
Lindsey Andrews · Gerry Canavan ·
Rebecca Evans · Nihad M.  Farooq ·
Erica Fretwell · Nicholas Gaskill ·
Patrick Jagoda · Erin Gentry Lamb ·
Jennifer Rhee · Britt Rusert ·
Matthew A.  Taylor · Aarthi Vadde ·
Priscilla Wald · Rebecca Walsh
Editors
The Palgrave Handbook

of Twentieth
and Twenty-First
Century Literature
and Science
Editors
See next page
Palgrave Handbooks of Literature and Science

ISBN 978-3-030-48243-5 ISBN 978-3-030-48244-2 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48244-2
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Editors
Neel Ahuja Monique Allewaert
University of California, Santa Cruz University of Wisconsin–Madison
Santa Cruz, CA, USA Madison, WI, USA
Lindsey Andrews Gerry Canavan

North Carolina State University Marquette University
Raleigh, NC, USA Milwaukee, WI, USA
Rebecca Evans Nihad M. Farooq

Southwestern University Georgia Institute of Technology
Georgetown, TX, USA Atlanta, GA, USA
Erica Fretwell Nicholas Gaskill

University at Albany, State University University of Oxford
of New York Oxford, UK
Albany, NY, USA
Erin Gentry Lamb
Patrick Jagoda Case Western Reserve University
University of Chicago Cleveland, OH, USA
Chicago, IL, USA
Britt Rusert
Jennifer Rhee University of Massachusetts Amherst
Virginia Commonwealth University Amherst, MA, USA
Richmond, VA, USA
Aarthi Vadde
Matthew A. Taylor Duke University
University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill Durham, NC, USA
Chapel Hill, NC, USA
Rebecca Walsh
Priscilla Wald North Carolina State University
Duke University Raleigh, NC, USA
Durham, NC, USA
We dedicate this work to the many whose lives have been adversely affected by
the pandemic that has swept across the globe while this work came to fruition,
revealing at every turn the inextricable links among science, politics, and society,
the inequities of our global society, and the paramount importance of careful
and critical acts of reading, responding, and caring for one another, in every
field and in every encounter. We acknowledge both the hopeful role and the
limits of knowledge communities as we move into a future in a world that gives
privileged voice and access to some, while denying the very right to breathe for a
great many more.
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank Ben Doyle and Howard Marchitello for their eager
and open-minded support of having a collective edit this volume as well as
for their encouragement and sage editorial counsel along with that of Shaun
Vigil and Allie Troyanos. We are grateful for Rachel Jacobe’s excellent (and
patient) editorial assistance as we edged across the finish line.
This work was supported by the Wellcome Trust [203109/Z/16/Z].
ix
Praise for The Palgrave Handbook
of Twentieth and Twenty-First Century
Literature and Science
“This is an eclectic collection in the very best of ways: wide-ranging in genre,

method, and conceptualisation. Most valuably it reveals a democratising
impulse that speaks directly to the contemporary politics of literature and
science, illuminating the field’s strength in bringing together scholars in a
united effort of understanding.”
—Martin Willis, Professor of English, Cardiff University, UK, and Editor,
Journal of Literature and Science
“This superb collection finally puts to rest the myth of ‘the two cultures’ by
comprehensively showing how, over 120 years of accelerating transforma-
tions, literature and science have become inseparable. The volume will be at
the forefront of debates about the interconnectivity of twentieth and twen-
ty-first century thought, culture, and practice.”
—Martin Halliwell, Head of the School of Arts and Professor of American
Studies, University of Leicester, UK, and author of American Health Crisis:
100 Years of Panic, Planning and Politics (forthcoming)
“This exciting collection is an excellent contribution to the field of litera-

ture and science. It is ideally suited for class adoption for courses in this and
related areas such as science and technology studies, literature and med-
icine, and literature and technology. The section on ‘Ethics and Politics’ is
an especially welcome exploration of the issues that the editors bring up in
their introduction, wherein the positionality of one’s own discipline and insti-
tutional setting is, far from being ignored in the analysis, very much included
as a part of it. Highly recommended for humanities scholars and others inter-
ested in interdisciplinary methodologies and inquires.”
—N. Katherine Hayles, author of Postprint: Books and Becoming
Computational (2020)
xi
Contents
1 Introduction 1
Part I Epistemologies
2 Mediating the Moon: Ferdinand Kriwet’s Apollo Mission 29

Kurt Beals
3 Writing the Elements at the End of the World: Varlam

Shalamov and Primo Levi 47
Anindita Banerjee
4 The Aesthetic Textuality of Oil 63

Brent Ryan Bellamy
5 Literature and Energy 79

Jordan B. Kinder and Imre Szeman
6 Triangulate: Literature and the Sciences Mediated by

Computing Machines 97
Yves Citton
7 Behaviorism and Literary Culture 117

Scott Selisker
xiii
xiv CONTENTS
8 I’m Dying to!: Biopolitics, Suicide Plots, and the Ecstasy

of Withdrawal 129
Dana Seitler
9 Science, Literature, and the Work of the Imagination 145

Bishnupriya Ghosh
10 Edith Wharton’s Microscopist and the Science

of Language 163
Emily Coit
Part II Methods and Approaches
11 Reading Generously: Scientific Criticism, Scientific

Charity, and the Matter of Evidence 183
Todd Carmody
12 How Can Literary and Film Studies Contribute

to Science Policy? The Case of Henrietta Lacks 201
Jay Clayton and Claire Sisco King
13 Incantatory Fictions and Golden Age Nostalgia:

Futurist Practices in Contemporary Science Fiction 221
Rebecca Wilbanks
14 Reading Science: SF and the Uses of Literature 243

Amy C. Chambers and Lisa Garforth
15 Linguistic Relativity and Cryptographic Translation

in Samuel Delany’s Babel-17 263
Joseph Fitzpatrick
16 Autopoiesis Between Literature and Science: Maturana,

Varela, Cervantes 283
Avery Slater
17 Listening to Pandemics: Sonic Histories

and the Biology of Emergence 309
Robert Peckham
18 To Feel an Equation: Physiological Aesthetics, Modern

Physics, and the Poetry of Jay Wright 325
Steven Meyer
CONTENTS xv
19 Max Ritvo’s Precision Poetry 345

Lara Choksey
Part III Ethics and Politics
20 New Physics, New Faust: Faustian Bargains in Physics

Before the Atomic Bomb 363
Jenni G. Halpin
21 The Matter of In-Vitro Meat: Speculative Genres

of Future Life 375
Coleman Nye
22 Bodies Made and Owned: Rewriting Life in Science

and Fiction 397
Sherryl Vint
23 The Sciences of Mind and Fictional Pharmaceuticals

in White Noise and The Corrections 415
Natalie Roxburgh
24 Eugenic Aesthetics: Literature as Evolutionary

Instrument in the Early Twentieth Century 433
Kyla Schuller
25 Angry Optimism: Climate Disaster and Restoration

in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Alternate Futures 449
Everett Hamner
26 Oil and Energy Infrastructures in Science Fiction Short

Stories 469
Chris Pak
27 Biology at the Border of Area X: The Significance

of Skin in Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy 483
Sofia Ahlberg
28 Overlapping Agencies: The Collision of Cancer,

Consumers, and Corporations in Richard Powers’s Gain 495
Jeffrey Gonzalez
xvi CONTENTS
Part IV Forms and Genres
29 “Golden Dust” in the Wind: Genetics, Contagion,

and Early Twentieth-Century American Theatre 511
Kirsten E. Shepherd-Barr
30 The Art and Science of Form: Muriel Rukeyser, Charles

Olson, and F. O. Matthiessen at Mid-Century 525
Sarah Daw
31 Racial Science and the Neo-Victorian Novel 541

Josie Gill
32 W.E.B. Du Bois’s Neurological Modernity: I.Q.,

Afropessimism, Genre 559
Michael Collins
33 Graphic Bombs: Scientific Knowledge

and the Manhattan Project in Comic Books 577
Lindsey Michael Banco
34 “The Path of Most Resistance”: Surgeon X

and the Graphic Estrangement of Antibiosis 597
Lorenzo Servitje
35 The Automation of Affect: Robots and the Domestic

Sphere in Sinophone Cinema 621
Nathaniel Isaacson
36 Superman Holey Weenie and the Sick Man of Asia 637

Carlos Rojas
37 Modeling Long Novels: Network Analysis and A Brief

History of Seven Killings 653
Lindsay Thomas
Index 669
Notes on Contributors
Sofia Ahlberg is Associate Professor of English Literature at Uppsala

University, Sweden, with a special focus on the importance of energy human-
ities in educating citizens of the future. Her publications explore ecofiction,
climate change, pedagogy, as well as the intersection of narrative and informa-
tion in contemporary fiction.
Neel Ahuja is an Associate Professor of English at UC Santa Cruz. He is the
author of Bioinsecurities: Disease Interventions, Empire, and the Government of
Species (2016) and Planetary Specters: Race, Migration, and Climate Change
in the Twenty-First Century (2021).
Monique Allewaert is an Associate Professor of English at UW-Madison.
She works on American literature, colonialism, and environmental criticism.
Her first book Ariel’s Ecology drew on a range of colonial American texts
to theorize a “parahumanity” whereby human beings understood themselves
as being composed by and in relation to their material surround. Her book
in progress, Cut Up, focuses on the small and the particulate as key aes-
thetic and scientific problems of the colonial era. It argues that we can draw
on this eighteenth-century’s micro-scene to develop a counterpoint to the
Anthropocene.
Lindsey Andrews is a Lecturer at North Carolina State University where she
teaches classes on the relationships among science, medicine, and literature.
Her writing has appeared in Catalyst, American Literature, Configurations,
Lute & Drum, and The Edinburgh Companion for the Critical Medical
Humanities.
xvii
xviii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Lindsey Michael Banco is a Professor of American Literature and Culture

at the University of Saskatchewan and has interests in nuclear culture, con-
spiracy theory, and gothic/horror literature. He is the author of two books:
Travel and Drugs in Twentieth-Century Literature (Routledge, 2009) and
The Meanings of J. Robert Oppenheimer (University of Iowa Press, 2016).
Anindita Banerjee is an Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and
the Chair of Humanities in the Environment and Sustainability Program at
Cornell University. She is the author and editor of four books on science fic-
tion and technocultural studies, environmental humanities, migration studies,
and media studies across Eurasia and the Americas.
Kurt Beals is Associate Professor in the Department of Germanic Languages
and Literatures at Washington University in St. Louis. His research focuses
on twentieth-century and contemporary German literature, specifically avant-
garde and experimental literature, and media theory. His book Wireless Dada:
Telegraphic Poetics in the Avant-Garde was published in 2019.
Brent Ryan Bellamy is an Instructor at Trent University. Bellamy co-edited
An Ecotopian Lexicon (University of Minnesota Press, 2019) and Materialism
and the Critique of Energy (MCM’ Publication, 2018). He has recently been
published in Open Library of the Humanities, The Cambridge History of
Science Fiction, Science Fiction Studies, and The Cormac McCarthy Journal.
Gerry Canavan is an Associate Professor in the English department at
Marquette University, teaching twentieth- and twenty-first-century litera-
ture. He is the co-editor of Green Planets: Ecology and Science Fiction (2014),
The Cambridge Companion to American Science Fiction (2015), and The
Cambridge History of Science Fiction (2019), as well as the co-editor of the
academic journals Extrapolation and Science Fiction Film and Television. His
first book, Octavia E. Butler, was published in the Modern Masters of Science
Fiction series at University of Illinois Press in 2016.
Todd Carmody received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania
and has held postdoctoral fellowships at Harvard, UC Berkeley, Rutgers, the
Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies, and the Freie Universität Berlin. He
is presently an NEH Fellow at the Newberry Library. His first book, Work
Requirements: Race, Disability, and Reform in Progressive America, is forth-
coming from Duke University Press.
Dr. Amy C. Chambers is a Senior Lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan
University, working in the fields of science communication and screen studies.
Her research examines the intersection of science and entertainment media
with specific focus on religion, the presentation of women’s scientific exper-
tise, and the public understanding of science in science fiction film/TV and
medical-themed horror.
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xix
Dr. Lara Choksey is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Wellcome

Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health at the University of Exeter.
Her first monograph, Narrative in the Age of the Genome: Genetic Worlds
(Bloomsbury, 2020), considers how new descriptions of life and biological
value introduced through practices of genomic sequencing registered a cri-
sis in narrative form, involving the rearrangement and disappearance of realist
sites of transformation from the late 1970s. She has had articles and chapters
published in the Journal of Literature and Science, Sanglap, Ethical Futures
and Global Science Fiction (Palgrave, 2020), and Media Diversified.
Yves Citton is Professor in Literature and Media at the Université Paris 8
Vincennes-Saint Denis and Director of the EUR ArTeC. He is co-editor of
the journal Multitudes. He recently published Mediarchy (Polity Press, 2019),
Générations collapsonautes (Seuil, 2020), Contre-courants politiques (Fayard,
2018), The Ecology of Attention (Polity Press, 2016), Gestes d’humanités
(Armand Colin, 2012), and Renverser l’insoutenable (Seuil, 2012).
Jay Clayton is William R. Kenan Professor of English and Director of the
Curb Center for Art, Enterprise, and Public Policy at Vanderbilt University.
Author or editor of five books and numerous articles, he has received fellow-
ships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned
Societies, the NIH, and elsewhere.
Emily Coit is a Lecturer in English at the University of Bristol. She has
just finished her first book, American Snobs: Transatlantic Novelists, Liberal
Culture, and the Genteel Tradition (Edinburgh, 2021), and is co-editing a
volume of short stories for the Cambridge Edition of the Complete Fiction of
Henry James.
Michael Collins is a Senior Lecturer in Twentieth-Century American
Literature and Culture at King’s College, London. His first monograph, The
Drama of the American Short Story, was published by Michigan in 2016, and
his second, Exoteric Modernisms: Progressive Era Literature and the Aesthetic
of Everyday Life, is forthcoming with Edinburgh University Press in 2021.
Dr. Sarah Daw is Vice-Chancellor’s Fellow in Environmental Humanities
at the University of Bristol. She has held Postdoctoral and Visiting Research
Fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities,
University of Edinburgh, and she is the author of Writing Nature in Cold
War American Literature (Edinburgh University Press, 2018).
Rebecca Evans is an Assistant Professor of English at Southwestern
University, where she researches and teaches American literature and culture
and the environmental humanities. Her writing has appeared or is forthcom-
ing in venues including American Literature, ASAP/Journal, Science Fiction
Studies, Resilience, Women’s Studies Quarterly, The Cambridge History of
Science Fiction, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.
xx NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Nihad M. Farooq is an Associate Professor of American Studies in the

School of Literature, Media, and Communication at the Georgia Institute
of Technology. Her research moves between literary studies, American and
Atlantic Studies, critical race theory, and cultural studies of science and eth-
nography. She is the author of Undisciplined: Science, Ethnography, and
Personhood in the Americas, 1830–1940 (NYU, 2016).
Joseph Fitzpatrick is an Assistant Professor of the Practice in Letters and
an Assistant Professor of the Practice, Russian, East European, and Eurasian
Studies at Wesleyan University.
Erica Fretwell is an Assistant Professor of English at the University at
Albany (SUNY). She is the author of Sensory Experiments: Psychophysics, Race,
and the Aesthetics of Feeling (Duke UP, 2020). Her essays have appeared in
the journals American Literary History and J19, and in the volumes Timelines
of American Literature, The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Food,
and The New Walt Whitman Studies.
Dr. Lisa Garforth is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Newcastle University.
She has published extensively on environmental utopianism, including her
2017 monograph with Polity, Green Utopias. Her current research focuses
more broadly on science fictionality and social futures with a particular
emphasis on readerly practices and pleasures.
Nicholas Gaskill is an Associate Professor of American Literature at the
University of Oxford and Tutorial Fellow at Oriel College. He is the author
of Chromographia: American Literature and the Modernization of Color and
an editor of The Lure of Whitehead.
Bishnupriya Ghosh teaches global media studies at the University of
California, Santa Barbara. After the monographs, When Borne Across (2004)
and Global Icons (2011), she has turned to media and risk in the co-edited
The Routledge Companion to Media and Risk (Routledge, 2020) and The
Virus Touch: Theorizing Epidemic Media (work in progress).
Josie Gill is a Lecturer in the English Department at the University of
Bristol. She is the author of Biofictions: Race, Genetics and the Contemporary
Novel (Bloomsbury, 2020).
Jeffrey Gonzalez is an Assistant Professor of English at Montclair State
University. He writes and teaches on contemporary US literature’s relation-
ship to neoliberal life, and he has published articles in Critique, Mosaic, and
College Literature.
Jenni G. Halpin is the author of Contemporary Physics Plays and editor of
the Newsletter of the British Society for Literature and Science. An Associate
Professor of English at Savannah State University, her publications include
“Godly Mass Extinction and Representing Science that Isn’t: Harvest as
Science Fiction Theatre.”
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xxi
Everett Hamner is Professor of English at Western Illinois University. His

recent work includes Editing the Soul: Science and Fiction in the Genome Age
(Penn State, 2017) and essays in the Los Angeles Review of Books and Science
Fiction Film and Television.
Nathaniel Isaacson is an Associate Professor of Modern Chinese Literature
in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literature at North Carolina
State University. His research interests include literary and visual culture. His
book, Celestial Empire: The Emergence of Chinese Science Fiction, examines the
emergence of sf in late Qing China.
Patrick Jagoda is Professor of English and Cinema & Media Studies at the
University of Chicago and a game designer. He is Executive Editor of Critical
Inquiry and director of the Weston Game Lab. His books include Network
Aesthetics (2016), The Game Worlds of Jason Rohrer (2016), and Experimental
Games: Critique, Play, and Design in the Age of Gamification (2020).
Jordan B. Kinder is SSHRC-FRQSC Postdoctoral Fellow in the
Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University.
His recent work includes a co-edited issue of MediaTropes entitled Oil and
Media, Oil as Media and a chapter on oil sands reclamation in Energy Culture.
Claire Sisco King is Associate Professor of Communication Studies and
Cinema and Media Arts at Vanderbilt University. She is the author of Washed
in Blood: Male Sacrifice, Trauma, and the Cinema (2011), as well as numer-
ous articles, and has recently completed a book manuscript on celebrity cul-
ture, networks, and metonymy.
Erin Gentry Lamb is a Visiting Associate Professor of Bioethics and Faculty
Lead of the Humanities Pathway at the Case Western Reserve University
School of Medicine. Her research interests include aging, death and dying,
disability, bioethics, and health care and social justice. She co-edited Research
Methods in the Health Humanities (Oxford, 2019) and her work appears
in such forums as The Journal of Medical Humanities, The Health and
Humanities Reader, The Disability Bioethics Reader, and the Encyclopaedia of
Health Humanities.
Steven Meyer teaches English and American literature and modern intel-
lectual history at Washington University in St. Louis, where he specializes
in interrelations among twentieth- and twenty-first-century poetry, philos-
ophy, and science. He is the author of Irresistible Dictation: Gertrude Stein
and the Correlations of Writing and Science (Stanford, 2001) and editor of
The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Science (2018). Currently com-
pleting Cadences of an African American Culture, a study of the poetry of Jay
Wright from the 1960s to the present, he was the 2019–2020 Franke Visiting
Fellow at Yale’s Whitney Humanities Center.
xxii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Coleman Nye is Assistant Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s

Studies at Simon Fraser University. Nye is the co-author of the graphic novel
Lissa: A Story of Friendship, Medical Promise, and Revolution (University of
Toronto Press, 2017). Her current book project Biological Property: Race,
Gender, Genetics examines the mutual constitution of genetic understandings
of relation and property-based models of inheritance. Nye’s work on science,
medicine, and performance has also been published in such journals as Social
Text, TDR: The Drama Review, Women and Performance, Global Public
Health, and ADA: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology.
Chris Pak is Lecturer in Contemporary Literature and Digital Cultures at
Swansea University, UK. His research focuses on ecology, the environment,
and human-animal relations in science fiction (sf). His book, Terraforming
(Liverpool University Press, 2016), details the history of planetary adaptation
in sf. His website is https://chrispak.wixsite.com/chrispak.
Robert Peckham is MB Lee Professor of the Humanities and Medicine
at the University of Hong Kong, where he is concurrently Chair of the
Department of History and Director of the Centre for the Humanities
and Medicine. He is the author of Epidemics in Modern Asia (Cambridge
University Press, 2016).
Jennifer Rhee is an Associate Professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth
University. Her research and teaching examine connections across contempo-
rary science and technology, literature, and art. She is the author of All Too
Human: Labor and Dehumanization in the Robotic Imaginary (University of
Minnesota Press, 2018). She is working on a new book on counting technolo-
gies, from the emergence of statistics to big data.
Carlos Rojas is Professor of Chinese Cultural Studies; Gender, Sexuality, and
Feminist Studies; and Arts of the Moving Image at Duke University. He is
the author, editor, and translator of numerous books, including Homesickness:
Culture, Contagion, and National Transformation in Modern China.
Natalie Roxburgh (Ph.D. Rutgers 2011) is a Lecturer and Research Fellow
in English Literary Studies at the University of Siegen in Germany. She is
author of Representing Public Credit: Credible Commitment, Fiction, and
the Rise of the Financial Subject (Routledge, 2016). Her work can be read
in Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Mosaic, and elsewhere. She is co-editor of the
2020 Palgrave volume, Psychopharmacology in British Literature and Culture,
1780–1900.
Britt Rusert is an Associate Professor in the W. E. B. Du Bois Department
of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She
is the author of Fugitive Science: Empiricism and Freedom in Early African
American Culture (New York University Press, 2017) and co-editor of
W. E. B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America (Princeton
Architectural Press, 2018).
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xxiii
Kyla Schuller is Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality

Studies at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. She is the author of The
Biopolitics of Feeling: Race, Sex, and Science in the Nineteenth Century (Duke
UP, 2018) and co-editor of special issues of American Quarterly (2019) and
Social Text (2020).
Dana Seitler is Professor of English and Director of the Bonham Centre for
Sexual Diversity Studies at the University of Toronto. Her research interests
include late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American literature and
culture, queer theory and sexuality studies, feminist theory, science studies,
and visual culture. She is the author of Atavistic Tendencies: The Culture of
Science in American Modernity (University of Minnesota Press, 2008) and
Reading Sideways: The Queer Politics of Art in Modern American Fiction
(Fordham University Press, 2019). Her current project, Narcopoetics: A
Queer History of Addiction, focuses on the politics and aesthetics of the opi-
oid crisis at the intersections of race and sexuality in the USA. She has pub-
lished articles in American Quarterly, American Literature, Genre, Cultural
Critique, GL/Q, and Criticism.
Scott Selisker is Associate Professor of English at the University of Arizona.
He is the author of Human Programming: Brainwashing, Automatons, and
American Unfreedom (University of Minnesota Press, 2016) and of articles
in journals including American Literature, NOVEL, Science Fiction Studies,
American Literary History, and New Literary History.
Lorenzo Servitje is Assistant Professor of Literature and Medicine, a dual
appointment in the Department of English and the Health, Medicine, and
Society Program at Lehigh University. His monograph, Medicine Is War:
The Martial Metaphor in Victorian Literature and Culture (SUNY 2021),
traces the metaphorical militarization of medicine in the nineteenth century.
His articles have appeared in Literature and Medicine, Journal of Medical
Humanities, Science Fiction Studies, among other journals. He has co-edited
three collections: The Walking Med: Zombies and the Medical Image (Penn
State Press 2016), Endemic: Essays in Contagion Theory (Palgrave 2016), and
Syphilis and Subjectivity: From the Victorians to the Present (Palgrave 2017).
Kirsten E. Shepherd-Barr is Professor of English and Theatre Studies at
the University of Oxford and a fellow of St Catherine’s College. Her books
include Science on Stage: From Doctor Faustus to Copenhagen (2006), Theatre
and Evolution from Ibsen to Beckett (2015), Modern Drama: A Very Short
Introduction (2016), and The Cambridge Companion to Theatre and Science
(2020).
Avery Slater is an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto’s Department
of English and an inaugural Faculty Fellow at the Schwartz Reisman Institute
for Technology and Society. Her research focuses on contemporary questions
emerging at the intersection of artificial intelligence and the humanities, with
xxiv NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
an emphasis on twentieth- and twenty-first-century poetics in a global context.

Her work has recently appeared in Critical Inquiry, Symplokē, Cultural Critique,
American Literature, and other journals.
Imre Szeman is University Research Chair of Environmental Communication
at the University of Waterloo. He is author (most recently) of Petrocultures:
Globalization, Culture, and Energy (2019) and is currently working on Energy
Impasse: Scenes from a Resource Interregnum (with Mark Simpson).
Matthew A. Taylor is an Associate Professor at the University of North
Carolina-Chapel Hill, where he works on the intersections among nine-
teenth- and twentieth-century science, literature, and philosophy in a trans-
atlantic context. His first book, Universes without Us: Posthuman Cosmologies
in American Literature, was published by the University of Minnesota Press,
and he currently is finishing his second book, which examines depictions of
life-as-such from Lamarck to Watson and Crick. With Priscilla Wald, he is the
co-editor of the journal American Literature.
Lindsay Thomas is Assistant Professor of English at the University of
Miami. Her research and teaching interests include the digital humanities
and contemporary US literary and cultural studies. Her book, Training for
Catastrophe: Fictions of National Security After 9/11, is forthcoming from the
University of Minnesota Press.
Aarthi Vadde is an Associate Professor of English and affiliated faculty in the
Computational Media, Arts, and Culture program at Duke University. She is
the author of Chimeras of Form: Modernist Internationalism beyond Europe,
1914–2016 (Columbia UP, 2016), which won the American Comparative
Literature Association’s 2018 Harry Levin Prize. She is the co-editor of The
Critic as Amateur (Bloomsbury, 2019) and the open-access “Web 2.0 and
Literary Criticism” (Post45, 2019). With the support of an NHC fellowship,
she is completing a second monograph tentatively titled: “We the Platform:
Contemporary Literature after Web 2.0.” Her essays have appeared in such
journals as Modernism/Modernity, New Literary History, NOVEL, Cambridge
Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, and Public Books.
Sherryl Vint is Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of
California, Riverside, where she directs the Speculative Fictions and Cultures
of Science program. Her books include Bodies of Tomorrow, Animal Alterity,
Science Fiction: A Guide to the Perplexed, and Science Fiction: The Essential
Knowledge. She is an editor of Science Fiction Studies and the book series
Science and Popular Culture. She has edited several books, most recently
After the Human: Theory, Culture and Criticism in the 21st Century. Her cur-
rent research, The Living Capital: Speculative Futures and Biopolitics, explores
the exchanges between speculative imagination and material practice in
biotech.
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xxv
Priscilla Wald is R. Florence Brinkley Distinguished Professor of English

and Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at Duke University.
She is the author of Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative
Form (1995) and Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative
(2008). She is co-editor, with Michael Elliott, of volume six of The Oxford
History of the Novel in English: The American Novel 1870–1940 and, with
Matthew Taylor, of the journal American Literature. She is currently at work
on a book-length monograph, Human Being After Genocide.
Rebecca Walsh is an Associate Professor of English and the Program in
Communication, Rhetoric, and Digital Media at North Carolina State
University. Her book, The Geopoetics of Modernism (UP of Florida, 2015),
examines the intersections between environmental determinist academic
geography, the National Geographic Magazine, and the transnational poli-
tics of space in modernist American poetry. She has also published in edited
collections, in PMLA (as a co-author), and has guest edited a special issue,
“Global Diasporas,” of Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial
Studies. Current projects examine the Anthropocene in the modernist and
contemporary periods, and African American and Indian transnational net-
works of resistance in the 1930s -1950s.
Rebecca Wilbanks received her Ph.D. from Stanford University’s Program in
Modern Thought and Literature, and was a Hecht-Levi Postdoctoral Fellow
in Bioethics and the History of Medicine at Johns Hopkins University. Her
work draws on literary studies and science and technology studies to address
the intersection of science and culture. Her current book project is entitled
Life’s Imagined Futures: The Speculative Science and Speculative Fiction of
Synthetic Biology. More information can be found at rrwilbanks.com.
List of Figures
Fig. 6.1 First diagram of triangulation 104

Fig. 6.2 Second diagram of triangulation 107
Fig. 6.3 Third diagram of triangulation 110
Fig. 9.1 Women dressed as handmaids protest against
US Vice President Mike Pence in Philadelphia,
23 July 2018 (Screenshot: The Hill 07/23/18) 159
Fig. 12.1 Data visualization by K.H. Oliver, with data provided
by J.W. Hazel from GetPreCiSe Research Seminar 206
Fig. 12.2 Data visualization by E.W. Clayton from GetPreCiSe
Research Seminar 209
Fig. 21.1 Google Burger tasting, Cultured Beef and Google (2013) 379
Fig. 21.2 In-vitro frog leg tasting, SymbioticA (2003) 379
Fig. 21.3 BiteLabs.org 382
Fig. 21.4 CulturedBeef.net 382
Fig. 21.5 Descriptions of James Franco-Furters and Kanye Salami
on BiteLabs.org 385
Fig. 21.6 Celebrity cubes on the menu of Next Nature’s
“In-Vitro Bistro” 388
Fig. 33.1 Robert Oppenheimer in Picture News, vol. 1, no. 1, p. 8 579
Fig. 33.2 Trinity test site in Fallout: J. Robert Oppenheimer, Leo Szilard,
and the Political Science of the Atomic Bomb, end-papers 584
Fig. 33.3 Countdown, Trinity, p. 69 587
Fig. 33.4 Atomic bomb detonation in Trinity, pp. 70–71 588
Fig. 33.5 Milliseconds into the first atomic detonation, Trinity,
pp. 72–73 589
Fig. 33.6 Prior to the Trinity test, Atomic Dreams: The Lost Journal
of J. Robert Oppenheimer, n.p. Jonathan Elias and Jazan Wild,
co-creators, David Miller and Rudy Vasquez, artists 590
Fig. 33.7 Hiroshima bombing, Trinity, pp. 126–127 592
Fig. 34.1 Chapter 1 601
xxvii
xxviii LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 37.1 Detail from the social network of A Brief History
of Seven Killings 656
Fig. 37.2 The strength of the adjacent edges for each node
with a strength value greater than 10 in the social network
for A Brief History of Seven Killings 659
Fig. 37.3 Strength values for the top 10, 15, and 20% of the nodes
in each network 660
List of Tables
Table 37.1 The sample set; word counts are from electronic editions,
and page counts are from U.S. hardcover editions 655
Table 37.2 Social network metrics 658
xxix
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
In his oft-referenced 1959 Cambridge lecture on “The Two Cultures,”

British novelist, physicist, and civil servant C.P. Snow famously resurrected an
erstwhile lament about a presumed and growing “gulf” between the arts and
the sciences in which the sciences are unduly disregarded by the “traditional”
intellectual pursuit of the arts. Snow’s scientific evangelism registers a per-
sistent tension in Western cultural history, which we can track from Thomas
Henry Huxley and Matthew Arnold’s late-nineteenth-century debates on
whether the natural sciences should finally be included alongside literature in
college curricula to Bruno Latour’s post-9/11 suggestion that a new form of
generative critical “gathering” is needed, one that does not pit scientific pur-
suits against cultural critique, but treats all constructed objects and ideas with
caution and care (Snow 2012; Huxley 1880; Arnold 1882; Latour 2004).
Indeed, this manufactured “two cultures” paradigm is now so fully
ingrained in our contemporary era that shocked post-2016 liberals were
prepared to march for the abstract concept of science as the incontroverti-
ble panacea to the post-truth era of Trump, an era of dangerous relativism
inaugurated, some would argue, by art and theory’s post-structuralist insist-
ence on the relativity of truth and reality. Once the perceived gatekeepers of
intellectual endeavor, the humanities meanwhile find themselves on the other
side of the “two cultures” coin, labeled as an esoteric and impractical field of
knowledge that has also unwittingly sowed the seeds for a war against facts
from which only science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM)
fields can save us.
T. T. Collective (*)
Durham, NC, USA
© The Author(s) 2020 1

N. Ahuja et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Twentieth and Twenty-First
Century Literature and Science, Palgrave Handbooks of Literature
and Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48244-2_1
2 T. T. COLLECTIVE
Yet however counterintuitive it may seem in our current moment—which

has witnessed the alliance of scientific research and global capital, as well as
the facile opposition of useful scientific “know-how” (useful to whom and for
what?) against the supposedly rarefied humanities—literature and science have
been and continue to be domains of knowledge that are, far from monolithic,
perpetually in flux and intertwining. For example, in the vibrant fields of fem-
inist science studies and the history of science and medicine, many scholars
have documented the capacious meanings and practices of science and liter-
ature in earlier centuries. Initially, “science” referred to knowledge as such.
Yet with the rise of empiricist paradigms in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries (following Francis Bacon’s articulation of the scientific method) up
through the technological developments brought by the industrial revolu-
tion in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, definitions of science began
to narrow. And as the modern research university emerged in the late eight-
eenth and early nineteenth centuries, as academic disciplines began to coag-
ulate—though they had not yet calcified—into distinct research programs,
science increasingly specified a particular kind of knowledge, one derived from
empirical procedures and tightly focused on the study of the natural world.
Nonetheless, science in this earlier moment was not viewed as inherently
oppositional to the more imaginative, speculative knowledge that literature
represented. More often than not, the two worked together.
Up through the nineteenth century, in other words, science and litera-
ture did not even name distinct fields of study. Embryology, for instance,
arose around 1800 as a science that sought to explain how living organ-
isms continually change while still being able to organize themselves inde-
pendently; it gave rise to the concept of rhythm, which became “a new
way of imagining that played a critical role in the consolidation of the
new science of biology” that cut across aesthetics, poetics, and philosophy
(Wellmann 2017, 17). In another notable example, as Amanda Jo Goldstein
(2017) argues, Romantic writers such as Blake, Shelley, and Goethe devel-
oped a “sweet Science” that deployed classical philosopher Lucretius’s
poetic materialism—the idea that tropes have physical substance and phys-
ical things are capable of figurative activity—to challenge the reorgani-
zation of knowledge spurred by the modern university, which invalidated
poetry as a way of knowing the natural and social worlds. While the natural
sciences were turning toward the problem of organic life, Romantic writ-
ers and thinkers redeployed Lucretian materialism in order to bolster poet-
ry’s claim upon the real. Thus, the gap between the epistemic communities
of the natural sciences (biology, geology, astronomy, physics, and chemis-
try) and “human science” (the humanities and social sciences) widened not
simply along a methodological fault line (inductive versus deductive logic)
but, Goldstein points out, along a linguistic one as well: prose the dominant
medium for describing the natural and social world “as it is,” and poetry the
medium for describing the “immaterial reaches of subjectivity,” including
1 INTRODUCTION 3
emotion and memory (Goldstein 2017, 7). Using figuration and verse to
remake empirical procedures, these literary experiments sutured scientific
and aesthetic knowing.
These particular examples of the cooperation of science and literature illus-
trate that in many pre-twentieth-century contexts the literary—contingent,
figurative, subjective—was widely understood not to supplement empirical
knowledge of the world but, rather, to arrive immanently within it. Not yet
fully professionalized, science was a capacious mode of inquiry “legitimately
claimed by a surprisingly broad range of practitioners and practiced in a num-
ber of nonacademic and noninstitutional spaces, from the parlor to the work-
shop, the church to the park,” Britt Rusert (2017) points out (5). Indeed,
as she shows, in the early-nineteenth-century United States a set of “fugitive
sciences” emerged that saw free and enslaved African-Americans repurpose
ethnology, astronomy, and botany in the name of freedom. Excluded from
most if not all institutions of learning, these “amateur” scientists fused empir-
ical procedures with speculative thinking, as their investigations of the natural
world became the basis for broader meditations on kinship, being, and the
category of the human.
Speculation frequently plays the foil to the practical applications of knowl-
edge codified by Bacon’s scientific method, yet even amid the dominance of
the empiricist paradigm from the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries, it
remained central to the kind of undertaking science was understood to be.
Speculation, in some ways, serves as the hinge upon which literature and sci-
ence have pivoted for so long: a form of thought that is fundamentally con-
cerned with querying “abstract” notions (of being, of beauty), and a form of
thought that unfolds in the subjunctive grammar of potentiality, the future
possibilities of the could be or might be. However much it emphasized special-
ization by the end of the nineteenth century, science “remained a discipline
that was not one,” as Nihad Farooq (2016) writes, offering “as much in the
way of philosophy, literature, travel narrative, cultural study, and social theory
as it did in the way of ‘pure’ science” (11).
The focus of this handbook is the twentieth and twenty-first centuries,
even as both the editors and the contributors resist the popular tendency
to view earlier scientific practices through an arguably twentieth-century
lens of hierarchy and fixity. While phrenology, taxonomy, eugenics, and the
general depiction of racially based traits as unyielding markers of inferiority
or superiority are all certainly woeful narratives that plagued science in the
nineteenth century, the actual science that came to fruition in this period
proved quite the opposite: that all organic processes are, in fact, in constant
flux, transforming and transformative, adapting, changing, mobile, and most
importantly, that human beings are not biologically separable by any kind of
discrete racial markers. To this end, we approach science and literature in the
twentieth and twenty-first centuries as interactive modes of knowledge that
carry forward historical practices of speculation, fugitivity, and amateurism.
4 T. T. COLLECTIVE
However, the distribution of scientific expertise beyond disciplinary modes

of knowledge production becomes harder to sustain in the twentieth cen-
tury. Literature and science remain co-evolving speculative forms even while
significant differences arise in their material conditions and methodological
identities as they become institutionalized within the university. Nowhere is
the division between the humanities and the sciences more obvious than in
the study of language in the early twentieth century. As philology split into
the distinct paths of literary criticism and linguistics, hermeneutics became
the basis of close reading (think F.R. Leavis) and logical positivism domi-
nated the philosophy of language (think Bertrand Russell). One critic, I.A.
Richards, actually crossed this chasm, and yet these two sides of his profes-
sional career―an interpretive literary critic on the one hand and the co-de-
signer of an artificial language called Basic English on the other—have largely
remained isolated from one another. As those in the field of literary studies
start to remember the more positivist endeavors of its leading lights, it is pos-
sible that literary methods will become more computational (as we see in
the rise of quantitative methods in the digital humanities), but it is unlikely
that computation will displace hermeneutics as the core of disciplinary
identity.
If logical positivism turned the study of language toward computation,
then the development of the digital computer turned science ever more
firmly, if problematically, toward the language of code. Although DNA
was discovered in 1869, it wasn’t until the 1950s, shaped as they were by
cybernetics, information theory, and wartime and Cold War cryptography,
that sciences such as molecular biology reimagined DNA as the “code of
life.” With the growth of computer power, neuroscience and genomic sci-
ence have increasingly relied on computational methods and processing that
require considerable funding for research.1 Representative here is the Human
Genome Project (HGP), which set out to sequence and map the entirety
of the human genome, spanning from 1990 to 2003 and representing the
efforts of multiple institutions across the globe.
Indeed, during the postwar era of “Big Science,” scientific projects
expanded significantly in size and required considerable funding. Much of
this work has been conducted in the laboratories of universities and private
companies and is beholden to the funding bodies, both public and private,
that enable this work. This financial structure, in turn, opens up scientific
research to the objectives of the funding organization, whether noble or oth-
erwise, such as the goals of for-profit commercialization (e.g., the extension
of the HGP into DNA testing kits or proprietary pharmaceutical formulas)
or social control through the continuation of racist and eugenic narratives
(again, DNA testing kits)—even as the tests have also sometimes proved use-
ful to others as a way to probe complex questions of cosmopolitan identity
in the present and to correct lies and omissions in the historical record. Or
consider the case of US university-based robotics and artificial intelligence
1 INTRODUCTION 5
research in the mid- to late-twentieth century, much of which was funded by

Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), in the name of mili-
tarization and strategic defense.
And yet, Snow’s two cultures diagnosis does not hold in the contempo-
rary era any more than it did in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as
the practice of science does not stand in isolation from the larger political
and cultural milieus its practitioners inhabit. Rather, science, like all forms
of knowledge production, is co-evolutionarily constituted by and with these
milieus. Katherine Hayles makes this point in her 1990 study of the concept
of chaos across postmodern literature, critical theory, and sciences including
mathematics, thermodynamics, and epidemiology; she notes that the connec-
tions she identifies across these fields emerge because “writers, critics, and sci-
entists, however specialized or esoteric their work, all share certain kinds of
everyday experiences” (Hayles 1990, 4). In other words, literature and sci-
ence are decidedly worlded practices that unfurl and unfold each other.
Working in the shadow of Big Science, scholars in feminist science stud-
ies have been essential to undercutting the “two cultures” claims. Donna
Haraway’s (1988) feminist objectivity emphasizes that knowing is ever situ-
ated, or shaped by the specific position of the one seeking to know, and thus
ever partial. Similarly, feminist theorist and theoretical physicist Karen Barad
(2007) describes scientific observation as informed by the scientific observer
and the techniques and technologies deployed in observation. Thus, science,
which is often characterized by authoritative claims of neutrality and disem-
bodied objectivity (indeed, an impossible subject position!), is in fact shaped
by specific worldviews, positions, and epistemological assumptions and tools.
Science shares this quality with literature, as well as with other cultural prac-
tices that seek to know something of the world. To understand science as
such is not to prescribe a slippery, untethered relativism, but rather to insist
that a rigorous scientific account acknowledges that what we know of the
world is shaped by how we come to know it, a methodological claim familiar
to many working in the humanities.
It is important to note, of course, the political and intellectual significance
of inquiry in the humanities in its work to debunk the “fake news” most
often proffered historically by pseudo-scientific narratives―i.e., the “science”
of races as separate species; the “science” of hysteria as a “female disease”; the
“science” of same-sex desire as pathological; and so forth. The intent of the
arts, and of critical theory specifically, as Latour (2004) defends in his own
contemporary lament, “was never to get away from facts but closer to them”
(231, emphasis in original), by examining and challenging the conditions of
certain historical moments that have allowed blatant falsehoods and discrimi-
natory logic to be delivered as facts or truths.
It is, then, not surprising that the emerging field of literature and sci-
ence coincided with the increasing attention to problems of social inequal-
ity, power, and violence and efforts to make scholarship relevant in part by
6 T. T. COLLECTIVE
enabling the possibility of envisioning more just and life-sustaining worlds.

Analyses of how literature might inform a more socially just science, as well as
how science frames discourses and material practices relating to colonialism,
race, sex, labor, and state formation, are at the heart of the field of litera-
ture and science, which, in turn, is well-situated to articulate a critical view of
problems including inequality, exploitation, overconsumption, and ecological
crisis.
While literature and science has largely remained a subfield of literary stud-
ies, many scholars of literature and science have found academic homes in
related interdisciplinary fields such as science and technology studies (STS)
and health/medical humanities where they position their work explicitly in
relation to social justice. Scholars working in STS see social justice as deeply
implicated in the questions they raise, from access concerns about where and
how people encounter science and technology to how scientific and tech-
nological innovations are imagined and funded, for whom the end results
are intended, whom they ignore, and who the researchers and research
participants are. Research in STS often pushes for increased equity across

all of these measures and has resulted in, for example, the inclusion of more
women, people of color, disabled people, and older people within research
studies. As another example, scholars working in the health humanities have
claimed “a shared commitment to social justice” as the unifying value of the
field, which is evinced in an emphasis on translational research that seeks to
“[involve] outside stakeholders in the research and [transmit] the findings
of that research back to the groups or participants being studied” (Klugman
and Lamb 2019, 5, 7). In essence, participation in this field requires liter-
ary scholars unabashedly to apply their training, bringing methods of critique
from the humanities to interrogate questions of identity and power in relation
to lived experience. At the same time, such work is often presented by pun-
dits, politicians, and college administrators as undertaken in the “service” of
other fields or institutions (such as STEM education, community organiza-
tions, or medical schools), a point that has led to the criticism that instead of
seeking radical change, “medical humanities seeks to improve the status quo”
(Herndl 2005, 595).
Such critiques point to tensions between the justice-oriented goals of
scholars in literature and science and the institutional contexts for the inte-
gration of the humanities with science, medicine, and technology in the con-
temporary university. The development of programs of study in these areas at
times depends on the growing influence of donor-driven university finance
and shrinking public outlays for university education, reflected for example
in the proliferation in tuition-generating Masters of Arts programs in the
Medical Humanities. Thus the intersection of literature and science is itself
a site of contestation for those advocating for a more socially just university,
suggesting that scholars in this area still have room to productively aid social
justice efforts by contributing knowledge and resources to efforts to expand
1 INTRODUCTION 7
marginalized segments of the curriculum (ethnic studies, feminist and queer

studies, poverty and labor studies, disability studies, among others); to use
the university to reduce inequalities in access to technologies; and to push
back against state efforts to reproduce militarism and policing through tech-
nology and communications research.
Another way to trace the emphasis on social justice within literature and
science is to move away from the academy and toward the field of culture
itself, examining literature rather than literary studies or humanistic fields.
Indeed, within those literary subfields most explicitly intertwined with sci-
ence and scientific developments, the long twentieth century has witnessed an
emergent and growing engagement with social justice.
Science fiction, for instance, is a literary genre that has since its inception
been preoccupied with science, and particularly with scientific futures. Over
the course of the long twentieth century, the genre took a number of turns:
early developments included the fin de siècle scientific romances of H.G.
Wells, Jules Verne, and others, the pulp era of popular magazines such as the
Hugo Gernsback-published Amazing Stories during the 1920s and 1930s,
and the largely techno-utopian fantasies of the “Golden Age” during the
1940s and 1950s. In the 1960s, however, with the emergence of the “New
Wave” of science fiction, the genre began to evince not only more diversity
among its canonized authors, but also more critical engagements with science
and more explicit investments in the social. Whereas the Golden Age tended
to endorse narratives of technological progress, New Wave writers explored
the ways in which scientific development was sometimes unlinked from and
sometimes at odds with social justice, often centering power-based estrange-
ments from the social sciences rather than the imagined feats of engineering.
From the rise of the pointedly techno-dystopian visions of cyberpunk in
the 1980s to the current explosive interest in Afrofuturism, science fiction
has not only engaged social questions in its representations and imaginations
of science, but has indeed attended specifically to highly differentiated access
to scientific “progress” and to forms of violence Western science has inflicted
on marginalized groups. In this way, science fiction in the late twentieth and
early twenty-first centuries is something of a return to the original form from
the nineteenth century: arguably, the literary genre has always been defined
by its critical interest in how social relations and structures of power interact
with technoscience.
Similarly, environmental literature—another literary subfield defined by
its engagement with the sciences—follows a trajectory of increasing recogni-
tion that science and social justice cannot be disentangled, especially since the
1960s. Just as the preservationist and conservationist movements of the early
twentieth century are largely overshadowed in contemporary environmental-
ism by the environmental and climate justice movements, so too has “nature
writing” valorizing a “pristine” wilderness given way to literary works that
engage embodiment and social vulnerability in their representations of the
8 T. T. COLLECTIVE
nonhuman. Since the emergence of the modern environmental movement

in the 1960s, and especially with the rapid growth of the environmental jus-
tice movement following the activism surrounding the dumping of PCBs in
Warren County, NC, environmental literature has increasingly engaged global
and local contexts of colonialism, racism, masculinism, hetero- and cis-sexism,
ableism, and classism. In contemporary environmental literature, including
climate fiction (sometimes called cli-fi), power and social difference are not
banished to the human realm of the political, but properly identified as cen-
tral to scientific and other engagements with the nonhuman.
The trends in environmental literature, science fiction, and literary stud-
ies in developing critical approaches to race, sex, empire, and militarism were
deeply influenced by the geopolitics of the Cold War and the assertion of the
New Left and decolonization movements that developed transnational calls for
social change in the 1960s. While the Cold War tension and nuclear standoff
between the United States and the Soviet Union produced dystopian, specu-
lative narratives and images of potential nuclear catastrophe, the challenge to
the twin US and Soviet imperialisms by the Non-Aligned Movement, decol-
onization movements in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, and movements for
racial and gender justice across continents emerged as central concerns among
authors responding to the social contests over the militarism of the Vietnam
War, forms of racial segregation, and the expansion of capitalist inequalities
with the onset of economic globalization. A variety of science fiction and envi-
ronmentalist authors integrated such concerns into both visions of dystopian
violence and imaginings of creative resistance, such as in Octavia E. Butler’s
Xenogenesis trilogy. In these novels, the post-apocalyptic environment of
nuclear disaster produces widespread social violence, which is challenged by
the protagonist, Lilith, as she encounters an alien species that upends humans’
organizations of racial and gender difference.
There are, of course, differences in how authors and scholars handled such
themes, and certain writers and traditions within these literary subfields rec-
ognized the centrality of social justice to scientific culture even before the
“turns” toward the social identified above as occurring roughly in the 1960s.
Still, these fields help to show that social justice is integral, not just to the
study of literature and science in the long twentieth century, but also to cul-
tural production within literary fields defined by their engagements with
science.
A brief consideration of these conditions demonstrates how the intersec-
tions between literary studies and science influence every level of thought
and production at the universities. To offer some context, the editorial col-
lective began the work on this handbook in late Spring 2015. Some of us had
studied together directly, while others had connected through geographical
proximity in North Carolina. Most of us emerged from English or Literature
programs, but many of us had also been trained in science studies and consid-
ered our disciplinary home to be in the nascent field of literature and science.
1 INTRODUCTION 9
In the preceding years, interdisciplinary collaboration between literary stud-

ies and the sciences had flourished, conferences and journal issues convened
around the topic, and the Modern Language Association (MLA) job post-
ings began to include faculty positions for scholars working at the intersection
of literature and science. The idea of putting together a primer that would
help solidify the field was exciting to all of us, as was working as an editorial
collective.
Editing a collection together would, we fantasized, be a gesture toward the
democratization of knowledge that could allow us to share labor and simulta-
neously help to advance the field. At the outset, if we considered our political
and professional goals as connected to our objects of study, it was perhaps
in somewhat theoretical and even utopian terms: could published humani-
ties scholarship reflect the same level of authorial and editorial collaboration
as the sciences? Could such a collection—inspired by the ethics of both cit-
izen science and models of co-authorship in the sciences—make accessible
the often seemingly abstruse connections between aesthetics and empiricism?
But these theoretical questions, as our field teaches us, cannot be separated
from our working conditions and situations. Since the Great Recession, and
accelerated with the emergence of COVID-19, full-time, tenure-track posi-
tions in the humanities have been in decline, replaced by part-time, short-
term adjunct positions. Those of us involved in the collective were in a range
of positions, from tenured and tenure-track faculty to postdocs and lecturers,
working in a range of institutions, although primarily R1s and SLACs.
It took three years from the initial proposal to getting the official go-ahead
for the project from the publisher, and another two years to collect, edit,
and revise the chapters submitted by scholars whose work we admired and
had solicited for inclusion in the volume. In those five years, the university
changed, and so did our positions and locations within the institution, as did
those of the contributors. By 2020, it was impossible to ignore that our ini-
tial political and professional goals were not merely connected to, but more
explicitly, constituted part of our object of study. We were a living, breathing
example of the very thing we aimed to study: the cultural and material impli-
cations of the charged rhetoric around science and the humanities. We cannot
ignore how our relative positions within the university are tied to the topic
we have sought to analyze, and that our training has something to say about
the ongoing crises (of the humanities, of adjunctification, and others) in the
neoliberal university we are living through.
We have experienced and also bear witness to intensified adjunctification,
a decline in full-time and tenured positions, the continued rhetorical pitting
of STEM against the humanities as a justification for differential funding, a
decline in humanities majors and undergraduate degrees awarded, an increase
in discussion of “alternative academic” (altac) careers, the underfunding of
humanities departments, and the rise of the austerity university. While the
majority of chapters in this collection do not take the university as their
10 T. T. COLLECTIVE
object, they do lay out various histories and representational strategies that
lend to this auto-critique. Our own lives, the lives of the writers whose work
is collected herein, and the nature of the fields in which we have been trained
necessitate a brief foray into what we now see as the urgent mapping of the
institutional contexts we occupy.
During the period within which we have been editing this volume, the
humanities responded in multiple directions to the financial pressures and
changing landscape of the university. One major way was through the forma-
tion of institutional alliances with the sciences, one sign of which has been the
increased application of the scientific lab model to the infrastructure of the
humanities. Examples of humanities “labs” include the Health Humanities
Lab at Duke University, the Health Humanities: An Interdisciplinary Venue
for Exploration (HHIVE) Lab at the University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill, Game Changer Chicago Design Lab at the University of Chicago,
Experimental Humanities Lab at Indiana University, and Humanities Lab
at Arizona State University, all of which pursue applied and practice-based
work, seeking to demonstrate the value of humanities inquiry and methods
(e.g., cultural analysis and narrative-based methods) to problems in STEM
fields, and to bring humanities-oriented values (e.g., an attention to structural
inequality and social justice) into scientific conversations. They bring together
work between the humanities and the sciences, often in interdisciplinary fields
such as the medical humanities, digital humanities, experimental humanities,
and media arts and design. Although the content of such spaces often touches
upon science and technology, building on a longer humanistic interest in
STS, the form of the science lab itself has also changed the way some humani-
ties scholars work together and with colleagues in other disciplines. Given the
reliance of such labs on ongoing institutional or grant funding, some of the
challenges are those faced by all collaborations, including our own. Whether
innovative or opportunistic, these labs suggest changes within the institu-
tional relationship between the humanities and sciences.
Since the organizational, disciplinary, and financial shifts within the univer-
sity have made starkly visible the conditions under which we labor, they also
offer opportunities for transforming those conditions. The structural reor-
ganization of the academy today―and our own experience of that restruc-
turing―presents opportunities for imagining alternative genealogies and
new periodizations of science and the humanities across the twentieth cen-
tury. Crises are turning points (the word comes from medicine), and they are
also opportunities for transformation, especially if we attend to the memo-
ries flashing up at this moment of danger. We might, then, consider the les-
sons of earlier moments of institutional crisis and reorganization, including
how non-institutional practices and collectives historically refused the disci-
plinary divides that have defined the sciences and humanities within the acad-
emy, how marginalized subjects have challenged the bifurcations of literature
and science within and without the academy, and even the history of adjunct
1 INTRODUCTION 11
labor―in both the humanities and the sciences―in earlier historical periods.
We might use this crisis to examine how we attend to new modes of dispos-
session and precaritization while understanding that the university has always
been a site of exclusion and immiserating violence for historically disenfran-
chised populations in the United States and for colonized populations abroad.
In more positive terms, the interdisciplinary and collaborative nature of
STS scholarship, including our own here, potentially strains against models
of collectivity as they are practiced and co-opted in the sciences, especially in
lab settings. If humanities lab settings offer one site of the perils and promises
of networking in the sciences and humanities today, the science lab remains a
particularly vexed site, as a space and form that brings together what is most
utopian about scientific praxis (intensive collaboration, dialogue, and exper-
imentation) with its dystopian underbelly (epistemological and other forms
of secrecy, transfer of public resources and knowledge to the private sphere,
deeply hierarchical structures under PIs, and the hidden cultures of sexual
harassment and assault, in labs as throughout the university system, that our
institutions are only beginning to address). This may be a moment when
STS scholarship and humanities scholarship more generally―including digi-
tal humanities―need to untether from models of collaboration poached from
the sciences in favor of ethical models of collaboration that are developed
with explicit attention to differential access to resources, time, and institu-
tional power among collaborators within a group. Furthermore, while STS
scholars have at times found models for their own collaboration within the
sciences, the natural sciences might productively turn (back) to the human-
ities for tools, models, and even as predictive models for their own likely
future. Capital, as Walter Benjamin so famously pointed out, can only pro-
ceed through the production of crises, which is why in the current reorgan-
ization of the economy and its institutions, natural sciences are experiencing
their own crisis and full-scale reorganization, facing the extension and deep-
ening of already existing inequalities and divisions, such as are evident in
huge funding gaps between designer fields like bioengineering and the basic
sciences, as well as the expectation that Ph.D.s in the sciences will spend
years relocating for multiple postdocs or remain dependent on grant cycles
and the “soft money” of grants that always run out and thus keep research-
ers trapped within a cycle of financial precariousness and movement among
institutions.
This project has made us acutely aware of the tensions of our contempo-
rary moment, but also of the possibilities for the productive engagement that
grows out of scholarly work that crosses fields and disciplines to address issues
that are of broad historical and contemporary concern. The exciting range of
work collected in this handbook attests to the generative potential of scholar-
ship at the intersection of literature and science.
12 T. T. COLLECTIVE
Chapter Outline
The work on the intersection of literature and science is contributing sig-
nificantly to the changing terrain of literary studies in a variety of ways. Any
new focus brings novel works to light, and this turn in literary studies is no
exception. But perhaps the most exciting consequence involves the emer-
gence of new epistemological and methodological questions moving in both
directions: literary studies and scientific inquiry. The contributions to this vol-
ume represent a range of areas of inquiry and approaches that consider how
the integrated study of literature and science generates new insights into the
underpinnings in both fields. The contributors show how a focus on litera-
ture and science draws out new ways of conceiving how literary works pro-
duce and circulate knowledge about the world: how, for example, novels can
reveal the infrastructure shaped by fossil fuels; how the relationship of image
and word in graphic novels illustrates a peculiarly effective way to address
atomic fallout; or how humans imagine the ideas of “nature” or “illness.”
Conversely, literary and literary critical approaches to scientific works broaden
our understanding of the nature of scientific inquiry, emphasizing the role of
narrative or image in conceptual shifts: how, for example, the affective charge
of words and images influences scientific models and uses of new technolo-
gies; how language can shape ways of imagining life itself; or how linguistic
figures can be translated into computational ones.
The chapters solicited for this collection represent a wide range of scientific
fields, including epidemiology and global health, genomics and biotechnol-
ogy, environmental and energy sciences, behaviorism and psychology, phys-
ics, and computational and surveillance technologies. They consider how
literary works register and often facilitate epistemological shifts and how they
are in turn affected by those changes. Many of these chapters address how
fiction across media uniquely explores the consequences—imaginative, social,
economic, and/or geopolitical—of scientific developments, whether past,
present, or future. Chapters examine such issues as how the prevalence of
concepts like networks or microbes has affected literary form; how contem-
porary novels have turned, in light of cognitive science, to the brain in place
of the mind; how more sophisticated computers have made literary works
more sensitive to the ways information circulates through language, images,
and stories; and how literary works can sensitize us to the slow violence of
environmental disaster and other forms of destruction. Given the increasing
speed of such developments from the second half of the twentieth century to
the present, it is not surprising that analyses of speculative fiction in particular
are well-represented in this volume, as the genre has become an increasingly
mainstream avenue through which to explore the blurring of science fiction
and scientific fact in the contemporary world. Most broadly, these chapters
share an interest both in how the fields of literature and science know and
make the world and in how the intersection of literature and science reveals
the ways concepts change and new concepts emerge. While this focus on how
1 INTRODUCTION 13
literary works register conceptual shifts is not new, the work on the intersec-
tion of literature and science has certainly augmented it. Several of the chap-
ters focus directly on that intensification. The authors represent a wide range
of fields and cross-disciplinary specializations as well as a range of professional
levels, affiliations, and approaches, but all are making significant contributions
to the burgeoning field of literature and science.
Given the focus of this volume on the twentieth and twenty-first centu-
ries, we have found it necessary and invigorating to think expansively about
the category of “literature,” especially as it intersects with newer media forms
such as film and digital writing. Our contributors consider long-standing lit-
erary genres such as the novel, poetry, and memoir alongside film, comics,
new media narratives, and other aesthetic forms that have increasingly made
their way onto the syllabi of scholars of twentieth- and twenty-first-century
literature and science. We note, moreover, that this expansion is not histor-
ically unique even if it is technologically specific. In some ways, we see our
contemporary use of the term “literature” as deriving from much older defi-
nitions of “literature” or “letters” that encompass fictional and nonfictional
works of the creative imagination.
We have divided the volume into four units, an organization of the work
assembled here that reflects and represents the cutting-edge scholarship
across the field: epistemologies; techniques and methods; ethics and politics;
and forms and genres. But while we intend these heuristic clusters to show
how the chapters begin to suggest emergent conversations within the field,
the richness of the chapters often made the decision of where to place them
difficult; the chapters consistently spoke to each other across our divides. Just
as this volume refuses the boundaries placed between the fields of literature
and science, we encourage readers to listen for the conversations that emerge
throughout the handbook as they challenge the volume’s own categorizing
system.
Epistemologies
The chapters in this unit address the knowledge that emerges at the inter-
section of literature and science, focusing on how the intersection produces,
in a Kuhnian sense, a conceptual shift, a new way of thinking about familiar
problems, or, more broadly, a new understanding of the world. Neither “lit-
erature” nor “science” has a clear definition; both describe creative processes,
although they differ in the ways they engage the world. As we noted in the
opening of the introduction, the stark distinction between them—if indeed
there is one—is a relatively recent development; the difference between a sci-
entific and literary imagination would have made little sense in centuries past.
Their convergence is the subject of the chapters in this section, which explore
both the insights each gains from the other and the brave new world that
emerges through their joint perspectives.
14 T. T. COLLECTIVE
The production and orientation of affect figures centrally in the sorts

of knowledges produced at the intersections of literature and science.
Humankind’s reaching for the moon long precedes any disciplinary inquiry;
Kurt Beal brings that longing into the mid-twentieth century through
his exploration of a multimedia project inspired by the 1969 Apollo 11
moon landing. Chapter 2 chronicles how stories shaped the human expe-
rience of the moon even as they gave expression to that longing. Kriwet’s
work, Beal contends, helps us understand how knowledge of the world
is mediated by the imagination, how we are motivated by our longings,
and how we therefore dwell, as Emily Dickinson might say, in poetry and
possibility.
If human wonder inspires Beal’s chapter, the writers Anindita Banerjee
considers in Chapter 3 were motivated by their effort to make sense of the
horror of the Nazi concentration camps and the Soviet Gulag. Seeking to
capture the unimaginable led these writers to scientific language, which,
though challenging literary language, offered an alternative view of catastro-
phe “as a web of relations between matter and energy.” Following the
insights of these works into imperceptible human and nonhuman relations,
Banerjee muses on the connections between the camps and nuclear catastro-
phes (Hiroshima, Chernobyl) and on the changing coordinates of time and
space that disclose the history of human destruction and the uncertain future
of human imagination.
Like Banerjee, Brent Ryan Bellamy is intrigued by the intersection of liter-
ary and scientific texture as well as textuality. In Chapter 4, he draws on liter-
ary and visual depictions of oil landscapes to show the often invisible impact
of oil on the landscape as well as the human imagination. Where Banerjee
traces a particulate path through the elements of devastation, Bellamy jour-
neys through the infrastructure of petroculture, but both are pilgrimages
through disaster with the at least implicit hope of revelation.
If Beal, Banerjee, Bellamy turn attention to the affects―wonder, horror,
hope―to which literary and scientific modes of expression give expression,
another line of chapters in this section investigates the ways that structures of
power shape what is known, and how one knows, in addition to the affects
that follow on knowledge. For instance, Jordan Kinder and Imre Szeman’s
engagement with petroculture stresses the impossibility of understanding
the contemporary moment without perceiving humanity’s thorough sat-
uration in the infrastructure and economy of oil. All contemporary literary
works, they maintain, register that saturation, and if, as a number of contem-
porary critics have noted, authors have not always cognized that fact, their
works are important in displaying—to the critical eye—the ways in which oil
and its manifestations hide in plain sight. In Chapter 5, they chronicle the
dawning awareness of how the contemporary imagination has been shaped by
the relationships among energy, aesthetics, and culture both in the emerging
1 INTRODUCTION 15
academic field of energy humanities and in the increasing number of literary

works that have begun to treat energy—specifically, oil—as a topic.
The problem of how contemporary organizations of power shape knowl-
edge also drives Yves Citton’s analysis of how the added complexity of the
computing machine has recast traditional dichotomies between literature and
science, showing both new convergences and new divergences between lit-
erature and science. In Chapter 6, he takes us into the programmed world
we have always inhabited but not recognized as such to introduce us not to
the horror of the matrix, but to the everyday mediation of refracted experi-
ence as well as the shifting relations between literature and science as techno-
logical and political structures reconfigure over the course of twentieth and
twenty-first centuries. In closing his anatomy of shifting knowledge struc-
tures that follow on the changing relation between literature, science, and
computing, Citton returns to Vilém Flusser’s sanguine proclamation of how
the advent of mechanized computing has liberated numbers from letters and
unleashed a “visionary power” through which “science presents itself as an
art form and art as a source of scientific knowledge” with cautious optimism.
Caution because the near half-century that has elapsed since Flusser’s obser-
vation has not fully liberated the imagination from the deadening machine
of financial capitalism, but optimism because the human imagination, mani-
fested variously in such figures as artists, scientists, and hackers, rebels against
“the pre-programmed ends of financial profit” and seeks instead its ends in
life itself.
The ways that contemporary organizations of power are shaped by the
literary and scientific methodologies also inform Scott Selisker’s argument
that behaviorism—a psychology of the mind—was an especially powerful
illustration of that contemplation. “Behaviorism and Literary Culture” chron-
icles how the sciences of behaviorism influenced literary culture in two often
competing ways: in its influence on the quest for a scientific literary criti-
cism, which found its most influential expression in the methodology of close
reading, and in its adoption by speculative fiction in the form of the domi-
nant theme of mind control. Selisker’s Chapter 7 illustrates the intertwined
influences of science, literature, and literary criticism on how as well as what
we read.
Michel Foucault’s conception of biopolitics arguably represents the con-
summate epistemological conjunction between science and literature in the
narrative harnessing of life itself through which it constellates a popula-
tion and facilitates certain forms of governance. If there is a literary aspect
to biopolitics, then literary works might offer particular insight into its con-
stitution. That assumption informs Dana Seitler’s Chapter 8. Noting the
structural inequities implicit in biopolitics, Seitler considers the variable expe-
riences not only of biopolitics but of life in her reading of the treatment of
suicide as allegory and critique in novels at the beginning and end of the
twentieth century. Arguing against the pathologizing and medicalizing of
16 T. T. COLLECTIVE
suicide in these novels, she reads it as an imaginative act—a fundamentally

distinct epistemology—that challenges the conceptions of life emanating from
the narrative of biopolitics.
The investigation of how power in our own cultural moment—
petroculture, computing, biopolitics—shapes scientific and literary knowl-
edge production doesn’t only delineate how power operates through knowl-
edge. Each also explores ethical responses that might reroute contemporary
organizations of power. Lamenting, with Latour, the consequences of the
hardening of disciplinary boundaries since at least the mid-nineteenth cen-
tury, Bishnupriya Ghosh returns to Mary Shelley for her insight into the dan-
ger of pursuing science in the absence of philosophy. In Chapter 9, she traces
Shelley’s legacy in the emerging academic fields and subfields that are har-
nessing the conjoined imaginative power of science and literature. Drawing
on Margaret Atwood’s speculative fiction as an example, she concludes with a
reminder of the importance of attending to how readily today’s fiction bleeds
into tomorrow’s reality.
In Chapter 10, Emily Coit traces the fall of the protagonist, a microscopist
who gains fame through a satire of popular science, in “The Descent of Man”
to show the convergence of literature and science in the power of the word.
Coit considers Edith Wharton in the context of a group of prominent intel-
lectuals of the moment—many her friends—who were grappling with what
the lessons of biology and linguistics were revealing about the past and what,
in turn, they predicted about the fate of civilization.
Methods and Approaches

The chapters in this section focus on how the intersection of science and lit-
erature produces new methods or approaches either to the history of science,
to literary and cultural criticism, or to both. While methods and approaches
suggest epistemology—hence there is considerable overlap with the chapters
in the epistemologies section—these chapters focus more specifically on how
one side of the science and literature equation might challenge the discipli-
nary practices or categories of the other as well as how literature and science
variously impact the world.
The rise of the research university at the turn of the twentieth century
derived from as it contributed to the rising prestige of science and the scien-
tific method. Todd Carmody documents the influence of that turn on literary
criticism, itself an emerging discipline, in Chapter 11, showing how literary
critics turned to science as a model for how they might establish their exper-
tise and prestige. But that turn, he suggests, had surprising consequences,
notably the emergence of the third branch: social science. Thereby establish-
ing an important but overlooked corollary between reading texts and read-
ing the world, he offers a new framework through which to understand such
1 INTRODUCTION 17
institutional events as the culture wars and the contemporary challenge to the
importance of humanities scholarship.
While that challenge has received considerable attention since the turn
of the twenty-first century, the previous three decades have also witnessed
a growing awareness among scientists and policy analysts of the important
contribution literary and cultural critical works and the approaches they
inspire can make to the study of science as well as to science policy and eth-
ics. Several of the chapters in this section explore that turn. In Chapter 12,
Jay Clayton and Claire Sisco King chronicle their participation in a
multi-disciplinary policy initiative concerning genetic policy funded by the
National Institutes of Health (NIH). Showing how recent changes in the
way health policy is formulated have opened new opportunities for humani-
ties scholars, they describe how they used literary and cultural works and the
methods of literary and cultural criticism to demonstrate the human—and
communal—dimensions entailed in decisions concerning genetic research and
personal privacy.
Science fiction in particular lends itself to these efforts because of its emer-
gence as an engagement with the impact of science and technology on social
and geopolitical relations. As SF critics have noted, it is an intrinsically crit-
ical genre. Rebecca Wilbanks documents the long-standing demand for sci-
ence fiction “to do rather than teach…to bring about or ward off real-world
states of affairs” in Chapter 13. She calls the works explicitly responding to
this mandate “incantatory” because of their authors’ faith in the power of
literature—of science fiction in particular—to impact the world. Tracing this
faith to “an evolving relationship between SF and the tradition of foresight
practices or futurology that dates back to the mid-twentieth century”—when,
in fact, science fiction emerged as a mass-produced genre—she shows how
incantatory fictions restore some of the techno-scientific optimism of an ear-
lier moment while, at the same time, they are tempered by the darker, more
critical turn the genre took after its Golden Age. Wilbanks herself expresses
faith in the salutary effect this sub-genre can have both on the genre as a
whole and on the culture in which it is being summoned to intervene.
For Amy C. Chambers and Lisa Garforth, that impact comes from readers’
engagement with SF. While literary critics are among the readers they con-
sider in Chapter 14, Chambers and Garforth are interested in the wide array
of approaches to fiction—in particular, to science fiction—for what it can
reveal about the power of the genre and, conversely, about the readers them-
selves. The genre allows readers to consider both the strange world science
fiction readers encounter and the ways that experience helps them recognize
and negotiate the strangeness of their own worlds. In the way science fiction
stages the encounter between science and literature, it offers readers a useful
way of making sense of the changes that attend rapid developments of sci-
ence and technology and of the world it is registering as well as the one it is
helping to create.
18 T. T. COLLECTIVE
If literary works can facilitate the process of negotiating the strangeness of a

rapidly transforming world, it is in part because they can offer insight into scien-
tific methods and approaches—perhaps, in the process, opening up new areas of
inquiry. That is the focus of three of the chapters in this section. In Chapter 15,
Joseph Fitzpatrick explores the attraction of linguistic theories—in particular, of
the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that language structures human thought and experi-
ence—for science fiction. Although he is interested, in this chapter, in why that
thesis has such purchase for science fiction, his focus is on what science fiction
contributes to a largely discredited linguistic theory. Drawing mainly on Babel-
17, he shows both why the subject of language—and translatability—appeals to
authors exploring strange alien encounters and the power and urgency of com-
munication, and how science fiction gives material form and cultural context to
linguistic theory, thereby drawing out the insightful creativity and the ideologi-
cal underpinnings of the hypothesis.
Mutual borrowings between science and literary criticism are also the sub-
ject of Avery Slater’s chapter, in which she documents the journey of the
term “autopoiesis”—the process by which a system reproduces and main-
tains itself—from its emergence in theoretical biology in 1970 through sys-
tems theory to literary theory and cultural criticism. Chapter 16 considers the
appeal of that concept but also the wonderful irony, as Slater puts it, that the
literary and cultural critics are not so much borrowing the term as “borrow-
ing it back.” In her analysis of the strange history of the term and concept—
which, she contends, began in a philosophical treatment of Don Quixote,
mutated in its adoption by scientists, and returned to open new modes of
inquiry in literary and cultural criticism―Slater illustrates the methodologi-
cal similarities and differences between literary critical and scientific inquiry,
but also the ways in which through their borrowings and reborrowings, they
anatomize and expand each other.
Such borrowings make sense, according to Robert Peckham, because of
the literariness of science, although that literariness is typically obscured by
scientific claims to authority. In Chapter 17, Peckham shows how the use
of sound in three works focusing on pandemics and biological containment
offers insight into how our senses—in particular, visual and sonic—constitute
our experience of the world. With his focus on the sonic, Peckham demon-
strates the intrinsic politics of these ways of knowing. But he is interested
as well in how the sonic can challenge the visual authority of epidemiology,
and science generally, showing, for example, how it exacerbates the social
and geopolitical inequities pandemics inevitably underscore. The literariness
of these fiction and non-fiction works demands a reading of the “critical dis-
sonances” produced by the scientific approach to these problems and offers
insight into possibilities for a multi-factorial approach to pandemics that can
potentially address them more effectively and reduce their augmentation of
inequities.
1 INTRODUCTION 19
The final two chapters in this section focus on two poets’ treatment of sci-
ence and medicine as ways of making them more accessible to a broader read-
ership, as a way of exploring their complexity (Jay Wright) or offering a critique
of their assumptions (Max Ritvo). In Chapter 18, Steven Meyer chronicles the
parallel development of experimental ideas pertaining to science and poetry. Jay
Wright’s engagement with philosophy and physics, he contends, finds expres-
sion in poetic experimentation that juxtaposes “multiple symbolic discourses,”
including physics, to simulate “a pluralistic cosmos.” This experiential poetics
allows readers to grapple with complex scientific concepts.
Where Wright is interested in how these scientific ideas open the world to
a more engaged inspection for a public unfamiliar with and perhaps intimi-
dated by the complexity of the ideas, Max Ritvo’s interest was in publicizing
his experience of genetics and scientific medicine for what it revealed about
assumptions he sought to challenge. In Chapter 19, Lara Choksey shows how
Ritvo turns his medical diagnosis, his treatment, and his dying into a poetic
meditation that explores assumptions about the discrete and unique—and
isolated―body that at once determine and are reinforced by scientific med-
icine. Considering how Ritvo’s poetry dissects as it engages with the con-
temporary concept of precision medicine, Choksey shows how Ritvo thereby
offers an account of the human condition—and the value of the human com-
munity―that challenges the very premise of contemporary medicine.
Ethics and Politics

The chapters in this section are concerned with the ways in which literary
works address the ethical and political questions that arise out of scientific
research. They are interested in how literary works speculate about the broad
implications of the social and cultural changes wrought by new sciences and
technologies as well as in the difficulty of responding adequately to uncom-
fortable or politically inconvenient scientific knowledge. Taken together,
these chapters offer insight into the nature of literary works, their differences
from other forms of inquiry, and the various ways these works circulate in and
intervene against the social realities in which they were produced.
Jenni G. Halpin takes up the quintessential literary template for think-
ing through the relationship between scientific discovery and social con-
sequences, the Faust myth, in Chapter 20. In 1932, before the Manhattan
Project provided the ultimate case study for scientific ethics, friends and
students of Niels Bohr produced a play, written by Max Delbrück, called
“The Blegdamsvej Faust” as part of a variety show traditionally held at an
annual Copenhagen conference. The play reimagines the debates between
Bohr and Wolfgang Pauli over the existence of the neutrino as the conflict
between the Lord and Mephistopheles in Goethe’s Faust. Halpin navigates
the Blegdamsvej Faust along two parallel axes, simultaneously understanding
it as a student roast of the habits and mannerisms of their teachers but also as
20 T. T. COLLECTIVE
a sublimated articulation of the tensions fracturing the physics community at

that time—in the process presaging all the joys and terrors twentieth-century
atomic science would unleash.
In Chapter 21, Coleman Nye considers a contemporary Faust-style bar-
gain between science and social progress in a study of in vitro flesh, which
would allow for widespread meat consumption without requiring the rais-
ing or slaughtering of livestock. Artificial meat has been variously served
as a marker of utopian futurity (as with the cruelty-free replicators of Star
Trek: The Next Generation) as well as dystopian possibility and hypercapital-
ist global impoverishment (as in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy).
Nye’s study explores multiple vectors of fictionality and journalistic reportage
to explore how the concept of a future of in vitro meat is being “sold” to
customers in the present by activating existing circuits of racial and social cap-
ital. In these transactions/exchanges, the power of agrocapitalist megacorpor-
ations extends to an entirely new market that will give them even more direct
control over everything we consume.
Sherryl Vint’s Chapter 22 similarly explores the extraction of value from
life itself through her reading of contemporary science fictions about biocap-
italism and biotechnology. Her reading of Carrola Dibbel’s The Only Ones
(2015) and Ben H. Winter’s Underground Airlines (2016) shows how liter-
ary works can register and agitate against the massive social changes produced
by scientific discovery, in this case the way biocapital’s ecstatic promises of life
extension and genetic perfection obscure the more sinister intensification of
corporate wealth and social control. Science, we see in these novels, is never
science by itself, but is always imbricated in existing networks of power—a
reality that literature can help us understand and strategically assess/address.
Natalie Roxburgh explores a similar circuit between science, capitalism,
and the consumer in her study of late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-
century American literary “neuronovels” about psychopharmacology.
Chapter 23 interrogates the way Don DeLillo and Jonathan Franzen frame
psychiatry as a potentially suspect pseudoscience whose trademark drugs
threaten to flatten individual subjectivity into homogenized, universalized
brain chemistry. “Pharmaceuticals offer useful fodder for contemporary fic-
tion,” Roxburgh says, “because they are somewhere between science and
technology, substances for treating an ailment and products manufactured
according to a market demand resulting from the transformation of patients
into consumers”—which the novels problematize through their figuration of
psychopharmaceuticals as potentially fraudulent, potentially addictive, poten-
tially harmful, and potentially life-saving. The novels pit neoliberal market
imperatives against medical ethics and find both compromised when it comes
to the pharmaceutical industry.
In Chapter 24, Kyla Schuller explores a historical instance of a political
crisis caused by science and registered by literary history: the promulgation
of racist and eugenic ideals by some of Anglo-American literature’s most
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gulf of crime. Having resolved on the means to be employed in the
murder, she sent for a quondam servant of her father, Robert Weir,
who lived in the neighbouring city. He came to the place of
Waristoun, to see her; but it appeares her resolution failed, and he
was not admitted. She again sent for him, and he again went. Again
he was not admitted. At length, on his being called a third time, he
was introduced to her presence. Before this time she had found an
accomplice in the nurse of her child. It was then arranged that Weir
should be concealed in a cellar till the dead of night, when he should
come forth, and proceed to destroy the laird as he lay in his chamber.
The bloody tragedy was acted precisely in accordance with this plan.
Weir was brought up at midnight from the cellar to the hall by the
lady herself, and afterwards went forward alone to the laird’s
bedroom. As he proceeded to his bloody work, she retired to her bed,
to wait the intelligence of her husband’s murder. When Weir entered
the chamber, Waristoun awoke with the noise, and leant inquiringly
over the bed. The murderer then leapt upon him. The unhappy man
uttered a great cry. Weir gave him some severe blows on vital parts,
particularly one on the flank vein. But as the laird was still able to cry
out, he at length saw fit to take more effective measures. He seized
him by the throat with both hands, and, compressing that part with
all his force, succeeded, after a few minutes, in depriving him of life.
When the lady heard her husband’s first death-shout, she leapt out
of bed, in an agony of mingled horror and repentance, and
descended to the hall; but she made no effort to countermand her
mission of destruction. She waited patiently till Weir came down to
inform her that all was over. Weir made an immediate escape from
justice, but Lady Waristoun and the nurse were apprehended before
the deed was half-a-day old. Being caught, as the Scottish law terms
it, “red-hand,”—that is, while still bearing unequivocal marks of guilt,
—they were immediately tried by the magistrates of Edinburgh, and
sentenced to be strangled and burnt at the stake.
The lady’s father, the Laird of Dunipace, who was a favourite of
King James VI., made all the interest he could with his Majesty to
procure a pardon; but all that could be obtained from the king was
an order that the unhappy lady should be executed by decapitation,
and that at such an early hour in the morning as to make the affair as
little of a spectacle as possible. The space intervening between her
sentence and her execution was only thirty-seven hours, yet in that
little time Lady Waristoun contrived to become converted from a
blood-stained and unrelenting murderess into a perfect saint on
earth. One of the then ministers of Edinburgh has left an account of
her conversion, which was lately published, and would be extremely
amusing, were it not for the loathing which seizes the mind on
beholding such an instance of perverted religion. She went to the
scaffold with a demeanour which would have graced a martyr. Her
lips were incessant in the utterance of pious exclamations. She
professed herself confident of everlasting happiness. She even
grudged every moment which she spent in this world as so much
taken from that sum of eternal felicity which she was to enjoy in the
next. The people who came to witness the last scene, instead of
having their minds inspired with a salutary horror for her crime,
were engrossed in admiration of her saintly behaviour, and greedily
gathered up every devout word which fell from her tongue. It would
almost appear, from the narrative of the clergyman, that her fate was
rather a matter of envy than of any other feeling. Her execution took
place at four in the morning of the 5th of July, at the Watergate, near
Holyrood-house; and at the same hour her nurse was burned on the
Castlehill. It is some gratification to know that the actual murderer,
Weir, was eventually seized and executed, though not till four years
afterwards.—Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal, 1832.
A TALE OF PENTLAND.
By James Hogg, the “Ettrick Shepherd.”
Mr John Haliday having been in hiding on the hills, after the battle
of Pentland, became impatient to hear news concerning the
sufferings of his brethren who had been in arms; and in particular, if
there were any troops scouring the district in which he had found
shelter. Accordingly, he left his hiding-place in the evening, and
travelled towards the valley until about midnight, when, coming to
the house of Gabriel Johnstone, and perceiving a light, he
determined on entering, as he knew him to be a devout man, and one
much concerned about the sufferings of the Church of Scotland.
Mr Haliday, however, approached the house with great caution, for
he rather wondered why there should be a light there at midnight,
while at the same time he neither heard psalms singing nor the
accents of prayer. So, casting off his heavy shoes, for fear of making a
noise, he stole softly up to the little window from whence the light
beamed, and peeped in, where he saw, not Johnstone, but another
man, whom he did not know, in the very act of cutting a soldier’s
throat, while Johnstone’s daughter, a comely girl, about twenty years
of age, was standing deliberately by, and holding the candle to him.
Haliday was seized with an inexpressible terror; for the floor was
all blood, and the man was struggling in the agonies of death, and
from his dress he appeared to have been a cavalier of some
distinction. So completely was the Covenanter overcome with horror,
that he turned and fled from the house with all his might. So much
had Haliday been confounded that he even forgot to lift his shoes,
but fled without them; and he had not run above half a bowshot
before he came upon two men hastening to the house of Gabriel
Johnstone. As soon as they perceived him running towards them
they fled, and he pursued them; for when he saw them so ready to
take alarm, he was sure they were some of the persecuted race, and
tried eagerly to overtake them, exerting his utmost speed, and calling
on them to stop. All this only made them run faster; and when they
came to a feal-dyke they separated, and ran different ways, and he
soon thereafter lost sight of them both.
This house, where Johnstone lived, is said to have been in a lonely
concealed dell, not far from West Linton, in what direction I do not
know, but it was towards that village that Haliday fled, not knowing
whether he went, till he came to the houses. Having no
acquaintances here whom he durst venture to call up, and the
morning having set in frosty, he began to conceive that it was
absolutely necessary for him to return to the house of Gabriel
Johnstone, and try to regain his shoes, as he little knew when or
where it might be in his power to get another pair. Accordingly, he
hasted back by a nearer path, and coming to the place before it was
day, found his shoes. At the same time he heard a fierce contention
within the house, but as there seemed to be a watch he durst not
approach it, but again made his escape.
Having brought some victuals along with him, he did not return to
his hiding-place that day, which was in a wild height, south of Biggar,
but remained in the moss of Craigengaur; and as soon as it drew
dark, descended again into the valley. Again he perceived a light in
the distance, where he thought no light should have been. But he
went towards it, and as he approached he heard the melody of
psalm-singing issuing from the place, and floating far on the still
breeze of the night. He hurried to the spot, and found the reverend
and devout Mr Livingston, in the act of divine worship, in an old void
barn on the lands of Slipperfield, with a great number of serious and
pious people, who were all much affected both by his prayers and
discourse.
After the worship was ended, Haliday made up to the minister,
among many others, to congratulate him on the splendour of his
discourse, and implore “a further supply of the same milk of
redeeming grace, with which they found their souls nourished,
cherished, and exalted.” The good man complied with the request,
and appointed another meeting at the same place on a future night.
Haliday having been formerly well acquainted with the preacher,
convoyed him on his way home, where they condoled with one
another on the hardness of their lots; and Haliday told him of the
scene he had witnessed at the house of Gabriel Johnstone. The heart
of the good minister was wrung with grief, and he deplored the
madness and malice of the people who had committed an act that
would bring down tenfold vengeance on the heads of the whole
persecuted race. At length it was resolved between them that, as soon
as it was day, they would go and reconnoitre, and if they found the
case of the aggravated nature they suspected, they would themselves
be the first to expose it, and give the perpetrators up to justice.
Accordingly, next morning they took another man into the secret,
a William Rankin, one of Mr Livingston’s elders, and the three went
away to Johnstone’s house, to investigate the case of the cavalier’s
murder; but there was a guard of three armed men opposed them,
and neither promises nor threatenings, nor all the minister’s
eloquence, could induce them to give way one inch. The men advised
the intruders to take themselves off, lest a worse thing should befall
them; and as they continued to motion them away, with the most
impatient gestures, the kind divine and his associates thought meet
to retire, and leave the matter as it was; and thus was this mysterious
affair hushed up in silence and darkness for that time, no tongue
having been heard to mention it further than as above recited. The
three armed men were all unknown to the others, but Haliday
observed that one of them was the very youth whom he saw cutting
off the soldier’s head with a knife.
The rage and cruelty of the Popish party seemed to gather new
virulence every day, influencing all the counsels of the king; and the
persecution of the Nonconformists was proportionably severe. One
new act of council was issued after another, all tending to root the
Covenanters out of Scotland, but it had only the effect of making
their tenets still dearer to them. The longed-for night of the meeting
in the old hay-barn at length arrived, and it was attended by a still
greater number than on the night preceding. A more motley group
can hardly be conceived than appeared in the barn that night, and
the lamps being weak and dim rendered the appearance of the
assembly still more striking. It was, however, observed that about the
middle of the service a number of fellows came in with broad slouch
bonnets, and watch-coats or cloaks about them, who placed
themselves in equal divisions at the two doors, and remained without
uncovering their heads, two of them being busily engaged taking
notes. Before Mr Livingston began the last prayer, however, he
desired the men to uncover, which they did, and the service went on
to the end; but no sooner had the minister pronounced the word
Amen, than the group of late comers threw off their cloaks, and
drawing out swords and pistols, their commander, one General
Drummond, charged the whole congregation in the king’s name to
surrender.
A scene of the utmost confusion ensued. The lights being
extinguished, many of the young men burst through the roof of the
old barn in every direction, and though many shots were fired at
them in the dark, great numbers escaped; but Mr Livingston and
other eleven were retained prisoners, and conveyed to Edinburgh,
where they were examined before the council and cast into prison.
Among the prisoners were Mr Haliday and the identical young man
whom he had seen in the act of murdering the cavalier, and who
turned out to be a Mr John Lindsay, from Edinburgh, who had been
at the battle of Pentland, and in hiding afterwards.
Great was the lamentation for the loss of Mr Livingston, who was
so highly esteemed by his hearers. The short extracts from his
sermons in the barn, that were produced against him on his trial,
prove him to have been a man endowed with talents somewhat above
the greater part of his contemporaries. His text that night it appears
had been taken from Genesis:—“And God saw the wickedness of man
that it was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the
thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.” One of the quoted
passages concludes thus:—
“Let us join together in breaking the bands of the oppressors, and
casting their cords from us. As for myself, as a member of this poor
persecuted Church of Scotland, and an unworthy minister of it, I
hereby call upon you all, in the name of God, to set your faces, your
hearts, and your hands against all such acts, which are or shall be
passed against the covenanted work of reformation in this kingdom;
that we here declare ourselves free of the guilt of them, and pray that
God may put this in record in heaven.”
These words having been sworn to, and Mr Livingston not denying
them, a sharp debate arose in the council what punishment to award.
The king’s advocate urged the utility of sending him forthwith to the
gallows; but some friends in the council got his sentence commuted
to banishment; and he was accordingly banished the kingdom. Six
more, against whom nothing could be proven farther than their
having been present at a conventicle, were sentenced to
imprisonment for two months; among this number, Haliday was one.
The other five were condemned to be executed at the cross of
Edinburgh, on the 14th of December following; and among this last
unhappy number was Mr John Lindsay.
Haliday now tried all the means he could devise to gain an
interview with Lindsay, to have some explanation of the
extraordinary scene he had witnessed in the cottage at midnight, for
it had made a fearful impression upon his mind, and he never could
get rid of it for a moment; having still in his mind’s eye a beautiful
country maiden standing with a pleased face, holding a candle, and
Lindsay in the meantime at his horrid task. His endeavours,
however, were all in vain, for they were in different prisons, and the
jailer paid no attention to his requests. But there was a gentleman in
the privy council that year, whose name, I think, was Gilmour, to
whose candour Haliday conceived that both he and some of his
associates owed their lives. To this gentleman, therefore, he applied
by letter, requesting a private interview with him, as he had a
singular instance of barbarity to communicate, which it would be
well to inquire into while the possibility of doing so remained, for the
access to it would soon be sealed for ever. The gentleman attended
immediately, and Haliday revealed to him the circumstances
previously mentioned, stating that the murderer now lay in the
Tolbooth jail, under sentence of death.
Gilmour appeared much interested, as well as astonished at the
narrative, and taking out a note-book, he looked over some dates,
and then observed—“This date of yours tallies exactly with one of my
own, relating to an incident of the same sort; but the circumstances
narrated are so different, that I must conceive either that you are
mistaken, or that you are trumping up this story to screen some
other guilty person or persons.”
Haliday disclaimed all such motives, and persevered in his
attestations. Gilmour then took him along with him to the Tolbooth
prison, where the two were admitted to a private interview with the
prisoner, and there charged him with the crime of murder in such a
place and on such a night; but he denied the whole with disdain.
Haliday told him that it was in vain for him to deny it, for he beheld
him in the very act of perpetrating the murder with his own eyes,
while Gabriel Johnstone’s daughter stood deliberately and held the
candle to him.
“Hold your tongue, fellow!” said Lindsay, disdainfully, “for you
know not what you are saying. What a cowardly dog you must be by
your own account! If you saw me murdering a gentleman cavalier,
why did you not rush in to his assistance?”
“I could not have saved the gentleman then,” said Haliday, “and I
thought it not meet to intermeddle in such a scene of blood.”
“It was as well for you that you did not,” said Lindsay.
“Then you acknowledge being in the cottage of the dell that night?”
said Gilmour.
“And if I was, what is that to you? Or what is it now to me or any
person? I was there on the night specified; but I am ashamed of the
part I there acted, and am now well requited for it. Yes, requited as I
ought to be, so let it rest; for not one syllable of the transaction shall
any one hear from me.”
Thus they were obliged to leave the prisoner, and forthwith
Gilmour led Haliday up a stair to a lodging in the Parliament Square,
where they found a gentleman lying sick in bed, to whom Mr
Gilmour said, after inquiring after his health, “Brother Robert, I
conceive that we two have found out the young man who saved your
life at the cottage among the mountains.”
“I would give the half that I possess that this were true,” said the
sick gentleman. “Who or where is he?”
“If I am right in my conjecture,” said the privy councillor, “he is
lying in the Tolbooth jail, under sentence of death, and has but a few
days to live. But tell me, brother, could you know him, or have you
any recollection of his appearance?”
“Alas! I have none,” said the other, mournfully, “for I was
insensible, through the loss of blood, the whole time I was under his
protection; and if I ever heard his name I have lost it, the whole of
that period being a total blank in my memory. But he must be a hero
in the first rank; and therefore, oh, my dear brother, save him
whatever his crime may be.”
“His life is justly forfeited to the laws of his country, brother,” said
Gilmour, “and he must die with the rest.”
“He shall not die with the rest if I should die for him,” cried the
sick man, vehemently. “I will move heaven and earth before my
brave deliverer shall die like a felon.”
“Calm yourself, brother, and trust that part to me,” said Gilmour.
“I think my influence saved the life of this gentleman, as well as the
lives of some others, and it was all on account of the feeling of
respect I had for the party, one of whom, or, rather, two of whom,
acted such a noble and distinguished part toward you. But pray,
undeceive this gentleman by narrating the facts to him, in which he
cannot fail to be interested.” The sick man, whose name, if I
remember aright, was Captain Robert Gilmour, of the volunteers,
then proceeded as follows:—
“There having been high rewards offered for the apprehension of
some south-country gentlemen, whose correspondence with Mr
Welch, and some other of the fanatics, had been intercepted, I took
advantage of information I obtained regarding the place of their
retreat, and set out, certain of apprehending two of them at least.
“Accordingly, I went off one morning about the beginning of
November, with only five followers, well armed and mounted. We
left Gilmerton long before it was light, and having a trusty guide,
rode straight to their hiding-place, where we did not arrive till
towards the evening, when we started them. They were seven in
number, and were armed with swords and bludgeons; but, being
apprized of our approach, they fled from us, and took shelter in a
morass, into which it was impossible to follow them on horseback.
But perceiving three more men on another hill, I thought there was
no time to lose, so giving one of my men our horses to hold, the rest
of us advanced into the morass with drawn swords and loaded horse-
pistols. I called to them to surrender, but they stood upon their
guard, determined on resistance; and just when we were involved to
the knees in the mire of the morass, they broke in upon us, pell-mell,
and for about two minutes the engagement was very sharp. There
was an old man struck me a terrible blow with a bludgeon, and was
just about to repeat it, when I brought him down with a shot from my
pistol. A young fellow then ran at me with his sword, and as I still
stuck in the moss, I could not ward the blow, so that he got a fair
stroke at my neck, meaning, without doubt, to cut off my head; and
he would have done it had his sword been sharp. As it was, he cut it
to the bone, and opened one of the jugular veins. I fell; but my men
firing a volley in their faces, at that moment they fled. It seems we
did the same, without loss of time; for I must now take my narrative
from the report of others, as I remember no more that passed. My
men bore me on their arms to our horses, and then mounted and
fled, trying all that they could to stanch the bleeding of my wound.
But perceiving a party coming down a hill, as with the intent of
cutting off their retreat, and losing all hopes of saving my life, they
carried me into a cottage in a wild lonely retreat, commended me to
the care of the inmates; and after telling them my name, and in what
manner I had received my death wound, they thought proper to
provide for their own safety, and so escaped.
“The only inmates of that lonely house, at least at that present
time, were a lover and his mistress, but intercommuned Whigs; and
when my men left me on the floor, the blood, which they had
hitherto restrained in part, burst out afresh and deluged the floor.
The young man said it was best to put me out of my pain, but the girl
wept and prayed him rather to render me some assistance. ‘Oh,
Johnny, man, how can you speak that gate?’ cried she. ‘Suppose he
be our mortal enemy, he is aye ane o’ God’s creatures, an’ has a soul
to be saved as well as either you or me; and a soldier is obliged to do
as he is bidden. Now Johnny, ye ken ye were learned to be a doctor o’
physic; wad ye no rather try to stop the bleeding, and save the young
officer’s life, as either kill him, or let him bleed to death on our floor,
when the blame o’ the murder might fa’ on us!’
“‘Now, the blessing of heaven light on your head, my dear Sally!’
said the lover, ‘for you have spoken the very sentiments of my heart;
and, since it is your desire, though we should both rue it, I here vow
to you that I will not only endeavour to save his life, but I will defend
it against our own party to the last drop of my blood.’
“He then began, and, in spite of my feeble struggles, who knew not
either what I was doing or suffering, sewed up the hideous gash in
my throat and neck, tying every stitch by itself; and the house not
being able to produce a pair of scissors, it seems that he cut off all the
odds and ends of the stitching with a large sharp gully knife, and it
was likely to have been during the operation that this gentleman
chanced to look in at the window. He then bathed the wound for an
hour with cloths dipped in cold water, dressed it with plaster of
wood-betony, and put me to bed, expressing to his sweetheart the
most vivid hopes of my recovery.
“These operations were scarcely finished when the maid’s two
brothers came home from their hiding-place; and it seems they
would have been there much sooner had not this gentleman given
them chase in the contrary direction. They, seeing the floor all
covered with blood, inquired the cause with wild trepidation of
manner. Their sister was the first to inform them of what had
happened, on which both the young men gripped to their weapons,
and the eldest, Samuel, cried out with the vehemence of a maniac,
‘Blessed be the righteous avenger of blood! Hoo! Is it then true that
the Lord hath delivered our greatest enemy into our hands!’ ‘Hold,
hold, dearest brother!’ cried the maid, spreading out her arms before
him. ‘Would you kill a helpless young man, lying in a state of
insensibility! What! although the Almighty hath put his life in your
hand, will He not require the blood of you, shed in such a base and
cowardly way?’
“‘Hold your peace, foolish girl,’ cried he, in the same furious strain.
‘I tell you, if he had a thousand lives I would sacrifice them all this
moment! Wo be to this old rusty and fizenless sword that did not
sever his head from his body when I had a fair chance in the open
field! Nevertheless he shall die; for you do not yet know that he hath,
within these few hours, murdered our father, whose blood is yet
warm around him on the bleak height.’
“‘Oh! merciful heaven! killed our father!’ screamed the girl, and
flinging herself down on the resting-chair, she fainted away. The two
brothers regarded not, but with their bared weapons made towards
the closet, intent on my blood, and both vowing I should die if I had a
thousand lives. The stranger interfered, and thrust himself into the
closet door before them, swearing that, before they committed so
cowardly a murder they should first make their way through his
body.
“Samuel retreated one step to have full sway for his weapon, and
the fury depicted on his countenance proved his determination. But
in a moment his gallant opponent closed with him, and holding up
his wrist with his left hand, he with the right bestowed on him a blow
with such energy that he fell flat on the floor among the soldier’s
blood. The youngest then ran on their antagonist with his sword and
wounded him, but the next moment he was lying beside his brother.
As soon as her brothers came fairly to their senses, the young woman
and her lover began and expostulated with them, at great length, on
the impropriety and unmanliness of the attempt, until they became
all of one mind, and the two brothers agreed to join in the defence of
the wounded gentleman, from all of their own party, until he was
rescued by his friends, which they did. But it was the maid’s simple
eloquence that finally prevailed with the fierce Covenanters.
“When my brothers came at last, with a number of my men, and
took me away, the only thing I remember seeing in the house was the
corpse of the old man whom I had shot, and the beautiful girl
standing weeping over the body; and certainly my heart smote me in
such a manner that I would not experience the same feeling again for
the highest of this world’s benefits. That comely young maiden, and
her brave intrepid lover, it would be the utmost ingratitude in me, or
in any of my family, ever to forget; for it is scarcely possible that a
man can ever be again in the same circumstances as I was, having
been preserved from death in the house of the man whom my hand
had just deprived of life.”
Just as he ended, the sick nurse peeped in, which she had done
several times before, and said, “Will your honour soon be
disengaged, d’ye think? for ye see because there’s a lass wanting till
speak till ye.”
“A lass, nurse? what lass can have any business with me? what is
she like?”
“Oo, ’deed, sir, the lass is weel enough for that part o’t, but she may
be nae better than she should be for a’ that; ye ken, I’se no answer for
that, for ye see because “like is an ill mark”; but she has been aften
up, speiring after ye, an’ gude troth she’s fairly in nettle-earnest now,
for she winna gang awa till she see your honour.”
The nurse being desired to show her in, a comely girl entered, with
a timid step, and seemed ready to faint with trepidation. She had a
mantle on, and a hood that covered much of her face. The privy
councillor spoke to her, desiring her to come forward and say her
errand, on which she said that “she only wanted a preevat word wi’
the captain, if he was that weel as to speak to ane,” He looked over
the bed, and desired her to say on, for that gentleman was his
brother, from whom he kept no secrets. After a hard struggle with
her diffidence, but, on the other hand, prompted by the urgency of
the case, she at last got out, “I’m unco glad to see you sae weel comed
round again, though I daresay ye’ll maybe no ken wha I am. But it
was me that nursed ye, an’ took care o’ ye in our house, when your
head was amaist cuttit off.”
There was not another word required to draw forth the most
ardent expressions of kindness from the two brothers, on which the
poor girl took courage, and, after several showers of tears, she said,
with many bitter sobs, “There’s a poor lad wha, in my humble
opinion, saved your life; an’ wha is just gaun to be hanged the day
after the morn. I wad unco fain beg your honour’s interest to get his
life spared.”
“Say not another word, my dear good girl,” said the councillor; “for
though I hardly know how I can intercede for a rebel who has taken
up arms against the government, yet, for your sake and his, my best
interest shall be exerted.”
“Oh, ye maun just say, sir, that the poor Whigs were driven to
desperation, and that this young man was misled by others in the
fervour and enthusiasm of youth. What else can ye say? But ye’re
good—oh, ye’re very good! and on my knees I beg that ye winna lose
ony time, for indeed there is nae time to lose!”
The councillor lifted her kindly by both hands, and desired her to
stay with his brother’s nurse till his return, on which he went away to
the president, and in half-an-hour returned with a respite for the
convict, John Lindsay, for three days, which he gave to the girl, along
with an order for her admittance to the prisoner. She thanked him
with the tears in her eyes, but added, “Oh, sir, will he and I then be
obliged to part for ever at the end of three days?”
“Keep up your heart, and encourage your lover,” said he, “and
meet me here again, on Thursday, at this same hour, for, till the
council meet, nothing further than this can be obtained.”
It may well be conceived how much the poor forlorn prisoner was
astonished when his own beloved Sally entered to him with a
reprieve in her hand, and how much his whole soul dilated when, on
the Thursday following, she presented him with a free pardon. They
were afterwards married, when the Gilmours took them under their
protection. Lindsay became a highly qualified surgeon, and the
descendants of this intrepid youth occupy respectable situations in
Edinburgh to the present day.
GRAYSTEEL:
A TRADITIONARY STORY OF CAITHNESS.
In a beautiful valley in the highlands of Caithness, lies embosomed

a small mountain tarn, called the Loch of Ranag. The hill of
Bencheildt, which ascends abruptly from the water’s edge, protects it
on the north. On the south it is overlooked by a chain of lofty
mountains, individually named Scarabine, Morven, and the Pap,
which form a natural barrier betwixt Sutherland and Caithness.
Morven, the highest in the range, is nearly two thousand feet above
the level of the sea, and turns up conspicuously over the
neighbouring summits, like a huge pyramid. The extensive wild lying
between this magnificent chain of hills and Ranag, is clothed in the
autumnal season with rich purple heather; and here the plover and
the grouse, the denizens of the solitary waste, live unmolested,
except by the murderous gun of the sportsman. Near the north edge
of the loch to which we have just alluded, there is a small island, on
which may be still seen the ruins of an old keep or castle. The last
proprietor of this fortalice is said to have been a noted freebooter of
the name of Graysteel, who kept the whole county in alarm by his
predatory incursions from the Ord to Duncansbay Head, and, like
Rob Roy and others of the same stamp, rigorously exacted “black
mail,” or protection money. Tradition also reports, that, besides
being possessed of great bodily strength, he was an expert
swordsman, and a person of such a jealous and tyrannical
disposition, that none durst venture to hunt or shoot on his grounds,
without being challenged to single combat; and it may be added, that
none whom he encountered trespassing in this way ever escaped
alive out of his hands. It happened that one of the family of Rollo,
while pursuing his sport in the direction, one day unfortunately
encroached on the sacred property of the robber. Being informed by
some of his retainers that a stranger was hunting on the west side of
the lake, Graysteel immediately sallied forth, and, running up
towards the sportsman with menacing looks and gestures, gave him
the accustomed challenge. Rollo saw he had no alternative but to give
him combat, and being a high-spirited young man, he instantly drew
his sword; and, although he defended himself for some time with
great skill and courage, it is needless to say that he sank at last,
mortally wounded, under the more powerful arm of his antagonist.
The ruffian afterwards stripped the dead body of every thing that was
of any value, and then threw it into the loch.
The account of this melancholy occurrence, as soon as it reached
the family and relatives of the unfortunate youth, plunged them into
the deepest distress; but none did it inspire with more poignant
regret than the young laird of Durie, who was his bosom friend, and
had just been affianced to his sister, a very beautiful and interesting
girl of sixteen. The moment he heard of Rollo’s tragical death, he
determined to avenge it, although he knew he had little chance of
surviving a personal encounter with such a desperado as Graysteel.
Accordingly, having furnished himself with a good Highland
broadsword, and without communicating his intention to any one, he
set off for the residence of the freebooter. Nor was the route he had
to take, any more than the occasion of the journey, agreeable. A
trackless moor, of some miles in extent, lay between him and Ranag,
so very bleak and barren, that, in the words of the poet,
The solitary bee
Flew there on restless wing,
Seeking in vain one blossom where to fix.
He had not gone far, however, when he was overtaken by a severe

storm, which rendered it impossible for him to continue his journey.
The wind, which blew at times with irresistible fury, dashed the rain
in his face, mingled with hail, and howled like a maniac on the naked
moor. Clouds of turbid vapour, issuing, as it were, from a vast
furnace, hurried across the sky; and now and then the rolling of
thunder, while it prognosticated a continuance of the storm, added
not a little to its terrors. Driven by the wind, and battered by the rain,
our traveller began anxiously to look around him for some place of
shelter. At length, to his great joy, he espied, a few hundred yards
distant, a small solitary cottage, situated on the edge of the moor.
Thither he immediately directed his steps, and, on entering, found its
sole occupant to be a poor aged widow, who lived upon the
gratuitous bounty of the public. There was something, however, in
her appearance, though bent down with years and infirmities, that
spoke of better days. On a small stool beside her lay the Bible, which
she seemed to have been just reading. She welcomed in the stranger
with a look of much cheerfulness, and kindly offered him such
accommodation for the night as her scanty means could afford. As
the storm continued to rage with unabated violence, Durie gladly
accepted the proffered hospitality; and, in the meantime, the
venerable hostess did all in her power to make him comfortable, by
putting an additional peat or two on the hearth, and furnishing him
with something to eat. On examining the scanty furniture of the
apartment, which was now more distinctly seen by the light of a
blazing turf-fire, he observed, in one corner, a very uncommon-
looking sword, with the appearance of which he was not a little
struck. The hilt and blade were covered over with a variety of strange
characters and fantastic devices, plainly indicating that it was of
foreign manufacture, and belonged to a remote period. His curiosity
was powerfully excited; and on asking the old woman how she came
by such a magnificent weapon, she gave him the following particulars
regarding it. The sword, which had originally belonged to a noble
Saracen, was that of her deceased husband, who had been a
volunteer in the regiment of Highlanders that had gone over to
Holland under the command of Lord Reay. He had received it as a
present from a Polish Jew, whose life he had saved in a moment of
extreme danger. She, moreover, informed him that her husband,
while on his deathbed, had strictly enjoined her not to sell or dispose
of it in any way, but to preserve it as an heirloom of the family. On
getting this account of the sword, Durie told the woman who he was,
and the errand on which he was going, and begged of her to give him
the use of it for a single day. After much entreaty, she at last agreed
to give it, on the condition that it should be strictly returned.
The storm, which was short-lived in proportion to its violence,
gradually died away towards morning; and at the first peep of dawn
our hero, who burned with impatience to measure weapons with the
murderer of his friend, was up, and, with his enchanted sword firmly
girt on his side, pursuing his solitary route across the moors. His
spirits were now buoyant with hope; and he beheld with a feeling of
sympathy the universal gladness which, after the late convulsion of
its elements, was diffused over the face of nature. Already the “bird
of the wilderness” sang blithely overhead, whilst the beams of a
brilliant morning sun were beginning to dissipate the mists which lay
thick and heavy upon the hills. Our traveller was not long in reaching
the brow of Benchieldt; and scarcely had he descended half way
down the side fronting the castle, when he was met by Graysteel,
who, as usual, challenged him for intruding on his grounds, and
desired him to draw and defend himself. “Villain!” cried Durie,
unsheathing his weapon, which flashed in his hand like the
Scandinavian monarch’s celebrated elfin sword—“villain! you
wantonly slew my friend, and you shall this day atone for it with your
heart’s blood!”
The robber chief laughed scornfully at what he considered an
empty bravado, and immediately made a thrust at his opponent,
which the latter parried off with admirable dexterity. A desperate
struggle now ensued. Graysteel fought with the fury of an enraged
mastiff; but young Durie pressed upon him so hard with his never-
failing blade, that he was obliged to give way, and at last received a
mortal wound. After this, the hero of our tale went immediately
home, and, having raised a body of stout followers, proceeded back
to Ranag, took the castle, and nearly levelled it with the ground.
The denouement of our little story may be anticipated. After a
decent period for mourning had elapsed, Durie led his beautiful
bride to the hymeneal altar. Nor, in the midst of his happiness, did
he forget his good friend, the old woman of the moor. The sword,
which had proved so invaluable an auxiliary to him in the hour of
need, he not only returned to her, but he took her under his
protection, and kept her comfortable for the rest of her days—
Joy seized her withered veins, and one bright gleam
Of setting life shone on her evening hours.
—John O’Groat Journal, 1836.

THE BILLETED SOLDIER.
In the autumn of 1803, the Forfar and Kincardine militia,—then an

infantry regiment of about 1000 strong,—en route from the south of
Scotland to Aberdeen, along the coast road, happened to perform the
march between the towns of Montrose and Bervie on a Saturday. The
want of the required accommodation in Bervie for so many men
rendered it necessary that a considerable portion should be billeted
in the adjoining villages of Johnshaven and Gourdon, and on farmers
and others on the line of march. In carrying out this arrangement, it
so happened that one private soldier was billeted on a farmer or
crofter of the name of Lyall, on the estate of East Mathers, situated
about a mile north-west of the village of Johnshaven. David Lyall,
gudeman of Gateside, was a douce, respectable individual, a worthy
member, if not an elder, of the secession church, Johnshaven. His
wife, Mrs Lyall, possessed many of the good qualities of her worthy
husband, whom she highly venerated, and pithily described as being
“as gude a man as ever lay at a woman’s side.” Mrs Lyall was a rigid
seceder, a strict Sabbatarian, stern and rigorous in everything
relating to the kirk and kirk affairs, deeply learned in polemical
disquisitions, had a wondrous “gift of gab,” and by no means allowed
the talent to lie idle in a napkin.
The soldier produced his billet, was kindly received, treated to the
best as regarded bed and board, was communicative, and entered
into all the news of the day with the worthy couple. Everything ran
smoothly on the evening of Saturday, and an agreeable intimacy
seemed to be established in the family; but the horror of Mrs Lyall
may be conceived, when, on looking out in the morning rather early,
she saw the soldier stripped to the shirt, switching, brushing, and
scrubbing his clothes on an eminence in front of the house.
“Get up, David Lyall,” she said, “get up; it ill sets you to be lying
there snoring, an’ that graceless pagan brackin’ the Lord’s day wi’ a’
his might, at oor door.”
David looked up, and quietly composing himself again, said, “The
articles of war, gudewife, the articles of war; puir chiel, he canna help
himsel—he maun do duty Sunday as well as Saturday.”
The soldier, after cleaning his clothes and taking a stroll in the
romantic dell of Denfenella adjoining, returned in time to breakfast,
which was a silent meal. With Mrs Lyall there was only “mony a sad
and sour look,” and on the table being cleared, she placed on it, or
rather thrust, the “big ha’ Bible” immediately in front of the soldier.
“Weel, mistress,” said the soldier, “what book is this?”
“That’s a beuk, lad,” said the gudewife, “that I muckle doubt that
you and the like o’ ye ken unco little about.”
“Perhaps,” was the reply; “we shall see.”
On opening the book the soldier said, “I have seen such a book
before.”
“Gin ye’ve seen sic a book before,” said Mrs Lyall, “let’s hear gin ye
can read ony.”
“I don’t mind though I do,” said the soldier, and taking the Bible
he read a chapter that had been marked by Mrs Lyall as one
condemnatory of his seeming disregard of the Sabbath. The reading
of the soldier was perfect.
“There, lad,” said David Lyall, “ye read like a minister.”
“An’ far better than mony ane o’ them,” said the mistress; “but gifts
are no graces,” she continued; “it’s nae the readin’ nor the hearin’
that maks a gude man—na, na, it’s the right and proper application—
the practice, that’s the real thing.”
David saw that “the mistress was aboot to mount her favourite
hobbyhorse,” and cut her lecture short by remarking that “it was
time to make ready for the kirk.”
“Aye, ye’ll gae to the kirk,” said Mrs Lyall, “an’ tak the sodger wi’
ye; and see that ye fesh the sermon hame atween ye, as I am no gaun
mysel the day.”
The soldier acquiesced, and on their way to church Mr Lyall
remarked, among other things, that “the gudewife was, if anything,

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Palgrave Handbooks of Literature and Science

Cover credit: DigitalVision Vectors/Getty Images

Lindsey Andrews Gerry Canavan

Rebecca Evans Nihad M. Farooq

Erica Fretwell Nicholas Gaskill

“This is an eclectic collection in the very best of ways: wide-ranging in genre,

“This exciting collection is an excellent contribution to the field of litera-

2 Mediating the Moon: Ferdinand Kriwet’s Apollo Mission 29

3 Writing the Elements at the End of the World: Varlam

4 The Aesthetic Textuality of Oil 63

5 Literature and Energy 79

6 Triangulate: Literature and the Sciences Mediated by

7 Behaviorism and Literary Culture 117

8 I’m Dying to!: Biopolitics, Suicide Plots, and the Ecstasy

9 Science, Literature, and the Work of the Imagination 145

10 Edith Wharton’s Microscopist and the Science

Part II Methods and Approaches

11 Reading Generously: Scientific Criticism, Scientific

12 How Can Literary and Film Studies Contribute

13 Incantatory Fictions and Golden Age Nostalgia:

14 Reading Science: SF and the Uses of Literature 243

15 Linguistic Relativity and Cryptographic Translation

16 Autopoiesis Between Literature and Science: Maturana,

17 Listening to Pandemics: Sonic Histories

18 To Feel an Equation: Physiological Aesthetics, Modern

19 Max Ritvo’s Precision Poetry 345

Part III Ethics and Politics

20 New Physics, New Faust: Faustian Bargains in Physics

21 The Matter of In-Vitro Meat: Speculative Genres

22 Bodies Made and Owned: Rewriting Life in Science

23 The Sciences of Mind and Fictional Pharmaceuticals

24 Eugenic Aesthetics: Literature as Evolutionary

25 Angry Optimism: Climate Disaster and Restoration

26 Oil and Energy Infrastructures in Science Fiction Short

27 Biology at the Border of Area X: The Significance

28 Overlapping Agencies: The Collision of Cancer,

Part IV Forms and Genres

29 “Golden Dust” in the Wind: Genetics, Contagion,

30 The Art and Science of Form: Muriel Rukeyser, Charles

31 Racial Science and the Neo-Victorian Novel 541

32 W.E.B. Du Bois’s Neurological Modernity: I.Q.,

33 Graphic Bombs: Scientific Knowledge

34 “The Path of Most Resistance”: Surgeon X

35 The Automation of Affect: Robots and the Domestic

36 Superman Holey Weenie and the Sick Man of Asia 637

37 Modeling Long Novels: Network Analysis and A Brief

Sofia Ahlberg is Associate Professor of English Literature at Uppsala

Lindsey Michael Banco is a Professor of American Literature and Culture

Dr. Lara Choksey is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Wellcome

Nihad M. Farooq is an Associate Professor of American Studies in the

Everett Hamner is Professor of English at Western Illinois University. His

Coleman Nye is Assistant Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s

Kyla Schuller is Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality

an emphasis on twentieth- and twenty-first-century poetics in a global context.

Priscilla Wald is R. Florence Brinkley Distinguished Professor of English

Fig. 6.1 First diagram of triangulation 104

Fig. 34.3 Chapter 4 604

The Triangle Collective