ABSTRACT
In undertaking this investigation of women’s bodies and lives in the Victorian era, we have benefited from an interdisciplinary approach that brings together science and culture in new ways. Recent scholarship in a variety of fields has already begun to explore the productive intersections arising from combining, for example, the study of literature and the history of science; new areas of inquiry such as ecological criticism have facilitated a deeper understanding of Victorian environmental change (MacDuffie 2014; Hall 2017; Williams 2017). In working with a dual focus on science and culture, we have striven to bring a new set of questions to bear on each field, looking at scientific texts from the perspective of their cultural production, and examining culture with a scientific lens. Our project underscores that culture and biology are not separate spheres; they are intersectional and multidimensional.
