Inaugurated in 2007, the British Society for Literature and Science book prize is awarded for the best book in the field of literature and science published each year. Below you can find details of previous prize winners and shortlists and links to BSLS reviews of some shortlisted titles.
For the announcement of the book prize for 2011, click here. The winner was announced at the BSLS conference for 2012.
Book prize winners
2010
Sally Shuttleworth for The Mind of the Child: Child Development in Literature, Science, and Medicine, 1840-1900
The Mind of the Child is a rare example of a book which shows beyond doubt that literature has directly influenced the course of science. Through her compelling account of the emergent disciplines of child psychology and psychiatry, Sally Shuttleworth makes it clear that there is nothing in our own anxieties about childhood – and preconceptions about children – that the Victorians had not already thought of and worried about. She shows too that it was the novelists, including Dickens, Brontë, Eliot, Meredith, James and Hardy, who at once generated many of the insights of these new disciplines and interrogated them most acutely. Shuttleworth’s book is a model of critical prose as well as of literature and science scholarship. Lucid, accessible and engaging, it deftly leads its readers to realise her insights into Victorian culture and into the concept of childhood itself for themselves as they read. All told, this is a masterful study which will shape the field of literature and science in the nineteenth century and beyond for many years to come.
2009
Leah Knight for Of Books and Botany in Early Modern England: Sixteenth-Century Plants and Print Culture
All the judges for this year’s BSLS book prize agreed wholeheartedly that Leah Knight’s Of Books and Botany in Early Modern England was a very worthy winner. Knight’s book is a fascinating contribution to the study of literature and science in the early modern period. Elegantly written and meticulous in its scholarship, it opens up the field of botany in the sixteenth century for literary analysis and cultural history, drawing out too how central early modern thinking about plants was to print culture as a whole. As well as being an excellent contribution to the field in its own right, Of Books and Botany is one of an important new series of books on Literary and Scientific Cultures of Early Modernity published by Ashgate. Ashgate has been leading the field in publishing books on literature and science, and it is extremely encouraging to see research into literature and science in the early modern period getting the same serious consideration and support as work in this field in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
2008
George Levine for Realism, Ethics and Secularism: Essays on Victorian Literature and Science.
The prize committee agreed that Levine’s collection of essays on Victorian literature and science will be essential reading for anyone working in the discipline. Brilliantly argued and personally engaging, his essays have implications well beyond their period boundaries. This is true not only for the essay ‘Why Science Isn’t Literature’, which urges us to rethink the implications of constructionist ideas of science, but also of pieces such as ‘In Defense of Positivism’ and ‘The Heartbeat of a Squirrel’. Levine has been central to the shaping of the methodologies of the discipline in the last thirty years, and this collection of essays will continue to guide it in future decades.
2007
Ralph O’Connor for The Earth on Show: Fossils and the Poetics of Popular Science, 1802-1856.
Book prize shortlists
Shortlist of books published in 2010:
- Avner Ben-Zaken, Cross-Cultural Scientific Exchanges in the Eastern Mediterranean, 1560-1660 (Johns Hopkins University Press)
- Vike Plock, Joyce, Medicine and Modernity (University Press of Florida) BSLS Review
- Lisa Sarasohn, The Natural Philosophy of Margaret Cavendish: Reason and Fancy During the Scientific Revolution (Johns Hopkins University Press)
- Sally Shuttleworth, The Mind of the Child: Child Development in Literature, Science, and Medicine, 1840-1900 (Oxford University Press) BSLS Review
- Charlotte Sleigh, Literature and Science (Palgrave Macmillan) BSLS Review
Shortlist of books published in 2009:
- Brian Boyd, On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction (Harvard University Press) BSLS Review by George Levine, winner of the BSLS book prize for 2008
- Leah Knight, Of Books and Botany in Early Modern England: Sixteenth-Century Plants and Print Culture (Ashgate, Literary and Scientific Cultures of Early Modernity) BSLS Review
- Steven McLean, The Early Fiction of H. G. Wells: Fantasies of Science (Palgrave Macmillan) BSLS Review
- Laurence Talairach-Vielmas, Wilkie Collins, Medicine and the Gothic (University of Wales Press, Gothic Literary Studies) BSLS Review
Shortlist of books published in 2008:
- Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Glassworlds (Oxford University Press) BSLS Review
- Noel Jackson, Science and Sensation in Romantic Poetry (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism, no.73) (Cambridge University Press) BSLS Review
- George Levine, Realism, Ethics and Secularism: Essays on Victorian Literature and Science (Cambridge University Press) BSLS Review
- Benjamin Reiss, Theaters of Madness: Insane Asylums and Nineteenth-Century American Culture (University of Chicago Press) BSLS Review
Shortlist of books published in 2007:
- Jonathan Adams, Interference Patterns: Literary Study, Scientific Knowledge, and Disciplinary Autonomy (Bucknell University Press)
- Gowan Dawson, Darwin, Literature, and Victorian Respectability (Cambridge University Press) BSLS Review
- Mark Francis, Herbert Spencer and the Invention of Modern Life (Acumen)
- Elizabeth Leane, Reading Popular Physics: Disciplinary Skirmishes and Textual Strategies (Ashgate) BSLS Review
- James Mussell, Science, Time and Space in the Late Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press: Movable Types (Ashgate)
- Ralph O’Connor, The Earth on Show: Fossils and the Poetics of Popular Science, 1802-1856 (University of Chicago Press) BSLS Review