ABSTRACT
This chapter explores many ways in which scientists and literary figures redefined those lines or even tried to erase them altogether. The blurring cuts across both literary genres and scientific disciplines. There were scientists, such as Maxwell, who were poets, and there were romantic poets who drew on chemical philosophy. Significant exchanges between literary and psychological texts bear out the two-way traffic model. Science and literature also shared common methods, such as an emphasis on experiment and observation. The receptiveness of leading scientific naturalists of the second half of the nineteenth century to a Romantic literary figure from an earlier age would have seemed somewhat puzzling to Victorianists active in the field before the 1980s. By surveying the recent scholarship, The Routledge Research Companion to Nineteenth-Century British Literature and Science has prepared its readers to appreciate the richer picture of the relationship between science and literature that has emerged in the last few decades.
