Victorian Culture and the Origin of Disciplines

<p>Current studies in disciplinarity range widely across philosophical and literary contexts, producing heated debate and entrenched divergences. Yet, despite their manifest significance for us today seldom have those studies engaged with the Victorian origins of modern disciplinarity. <i>Victorian Culture and the Origin of Disciplines</i> adds a crucial missing link in that history by asking and answering a series of deceptively simple questions: how did Victorians define a discipline; what factors impinged upon that definition; and how did they respond to disciplinary understanding? Structured around sections on professionalization, university curriculums, society journals, literary genres and interdisciplinarity, <i>Victorian Culture and the Origin of Disciplines</i> addresses the tangled bank of disciplinarity in the arts, humanities, social sciences and natural sciences including musicology, dance, literature, and art history; classics, history, archaeology, and theology; anthropology, psychology; and biology, mathematics and physics. Chapters examine the generative forces driving disciplinary formation, and gauge its success or failure against social, cultural, political, and economic environmental pressures. No other volume has focused specifically on the origin of Victorian disciplines in order to track the birth, death, and growth of the units into which knowledge was divided in this period, and no other volume has placed such a wide array of Victorian disciplines in their cultural context.</p> <p>Introduction</p><p>Bernard Lightman and Bennett Zon</p><p>Section I: Professional Validation</p><p>Chapter 1. The Evolution of the Scientific Disciplines</p><p>Bernard Lightman</p><p>Chapter 2. Disciplining Terpsichore: Moves Towards the Study of Dance in Victorian Britain</p><p>Theresa Jill Buckland</p><p>Section II: University Education</p><p>Chapter 3. Positivism and Early Chairs of Art History in Europe: 1860-1880</p><p>Barbara Larson</p><p>Chapter 4. The Manchester School of History: Victorian Origins of a ‘Modernist’ Discipline</p><p>H.S. Jones</p><p>Section III: Society Journals</p><p>Chapter 5. Un-gentlemanly Science: Rhetoric and Rivalry in the Codification of British Zoology, 1830-1840</p><p>David Lowther</p><p>Chapter 6. The Scandalous Affair of the <i>Anthropological Review</i>: Hyde Clarke, James Hunt and British Anthropology in the 1860s</p><p>Efram Sera-Shriar</p><p>Section IV: Literary Genres</p><p>Chapter 7. ‘A subject which is peculiarly adapted to all cyclists’: Popular Understandings of Classical Archaeology in the Nineteenth-Century Press</p><p>Rachel Bryant Davies</p><p>Chapter 8. Victorian Autobiography, Child Study and the Origins of Child Psychology</p><p>Roisín Laing</p><p>Section V: Disciplinary Boundaries</p><p>Chapter 9. Disentangling Antiquity: Classics and Theology in the Nineteenth Century</p><p>Simon Goldhill</p><p>Chapter 10. From Truth to Proof to Computer Problem: Of Mathematical Discipline and Epistemological Change</p><p>Joan L. Richards</p><p>Section VI: Interdisciplinarity</p><p>Chapter 11. <i>Middlemarch</i> and the Limits of Interdisciplinarity</p><p>Renata Kobetts Miller</p><p>Chapter 12. All Arts Constantly Aspire to the Condition of Musicology: Victorian Musicology as Interdiscipline</p><p>Bennett Zon</p><p>Conclusion: Metapatterns, Metadisciplines</p><p>Bernard Lightman and Bennett Zon</p>