Victorian Interdisciplinarity and the Sciences: Rethinking the Specialization Thesis [Hardcover]

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

“From our twenty-first century vantage point, it may appear that the Victorians drew up and abided by the firm disciplinary boundaries that we work within today. But the close and nuanced reading in this volume reveals a messier, mobile, and more interesting nineteenth-century ecology of Western knowledge. Exploring both consensus and contest, Lightman and Sera-Shriar have assembled a cadre of leading and emerging scholars to unpack interdisciplinary ways of knowing via a range of scientists, sites, and media. At times surprising and otherwise challenging,Victorian Interdisciplinarity and the Sciencesis always engaging.” 

—Samuel Alberti, National Museums Scotland 

“This collection of essays provides a comprehensive, varied, and highly readable account of how the nascent disciplines of nineteenth-century science lã²