The third annual conference of the British Society of Literature and Science was hosted at Keele University and organised by Sharon Ruston and her team with just the right combination of exceptional efficiency and friendliness. Within the gold and gilt Victorian splendour of Keele Hall’s Salvin Room, Helen Small (Pembroke College, Oxford) launched the conference with a discussion of ‘The Function of Antagonism’. Addressing the question of what impact science might have on the ‘unlovely combination of triviality and self-aggrandisement’ perceived in today’s humanities studies, she stressed the vital role of science, its methodology and certainty, with the humanising effects of the arts in evaluating everyday truth and values. In doing so, she set a tone of philosophical yet relevant and urgent enquiry for the subsequent panels and questions.

With an ambitious twenty panels taking place in less than three days, the range of topics, authors and perspectives presented was truly extraordinary. On the first day alone, in Panel 2, Jason Hall (University of Exeter) led a panel on mechanised versification, by which programmers and computers have probed fundamental poetic forms and processes. He was followed by Heidi Kunz (Randolph College, Lynchburg, VA) who publicized the hilariously purple prose of ground-breaking, American author Augusta Jane Evans and the ways in which she borrowed scientific rhetoric to promote new depictions of nineteenth-century womanhood. The interrelationship of nineteenth-century science and poetry was pursued further by Gregory Tate (Linacre College, Oxford), who explored Tennyson’s view of the mind’s basis as physiological, ‘a random arrow from the brain’, and how this outlook emerges ultimately as an argument for an unchanging soul.

Later the same day, on Panel 6, Sara Clayson (Open University), Alistair Brown (University of Durham) and Robin Stoate (University of Newcastle) explored the untenability of the human subject in literature and film, through deformity and race, the ‘posthuman’ in science fiction, and the development of AI as malevolent and opposed to humanity. Their presentations prompted lively discussion of further topical links, such as the man-machine opposition in terms of world terrorism and the gendering of technology. After such a hugely satisfying intellectual feast, after dinner our host Sharon led a convoy of thirsty academics to the university pub, where discussions continued late into the evening – and it was still only the first day!

On Friday, Panel 9 concentrated on representations of multi-dimensionality, starting with Laurence Davies (University of Glasgow) on spiritualism and the ‘fourth dimension’ in the fictional writing of H. G. Wells, Balfour Stewart and the physicist P.G. Tait, as manifestations of the fin-de-Siecle fascination with the closeness of alternative dimensions to our own. Elizabeth Cornell (NYC Jesuit University) built on Laurence’s insights by way of Faulkner’s ‘idiot’ character Benjy, who has no sense of time, as a foundation for analysing the obstacles inherent to literary representations of time and relativity. The time-space focus of both papers proved to be directly relevant to the afternoon’s remarkable plenary, from physicist Frank Close (Exeter College, Oxford). As part of his discussion of the ‘nothingness’ of anti-matter, Frank exhibited the real-world applications of scientific theory, whereby he and his team are currently attempting to recreate and record the process of the Big Bang. Like Helen Small, he emphasised the vital role of art in science and vice-versa, by suggesting that to have only the latter would mean describing Beethoven’s music solely in terms of wave or particle movements.

With such a profound precursor, Panel 14’s subsequent focus on fairies and the imagination assumed an almost surreal air. Drawing on Arabella Buckley’s writings and illustrations, Melanie Keene (University of Cambridge) examined the place of magic in teaching nineteenth-century children about natural sciences, making the everyday world strange and alien, with fairies personifying invisible forces of nature. Children also acted as a focal point for Katharina Boehm (King’s College, London) in her study of the influence upon Dickens’s writing of his association with the Victorian paediatrician John Eliotson. The panel’s explorations of imagination, science and memory were completed by Greta Perletti (University of Bergamo), who discussed representations of problematic memory and hypermnesia in the works of Charlotte Bronte and Dickens.

On the final day of the conference, we were privileged to be present at Steven Connor’s erudite and entertaining plenary, in which he traced the development of x-rays and their association with vision and magic. His talk encapsulated much of the conference’s preceding concentration on the centrality of perception in science and literature, representations of human faculties and their power, and what Steven described as ‘fantasies of the illimitable’.

The intrepid panellists challenged with undertaking the conference’s last sessions included those on panel 19, where John Bryden (University of Leeds) presented his findings on robotics and dance/performance and how they challenge traditional scientific narratives. Nasser Hussain (University of York) followed this up with an equally stimulating and interdisciplinary explication of Christian Bok’s innovations in sound poetry, and the cutting-edge potential of biological data encryption within poetic forms. Elizabeth Throesch (York St John University) concluded the discussions with insights on the manipulation of spatial narratives in Henry James’s work, transcendental materialism and ‘extra-representational space’.

Heading home on the train, I watched the rain strike against the window. Some drops kept themselves separate while others linked briefly together, but almost all chased each other in steady and parallel, horizontal ‘lanes’ across the glass. Suddenly, however, a swift course of water would dash diagonally across all the rest, drawing those around it towards itself as it forged its new and unexpected channel. It struck me as particularly apt: a metaphor not only for the conference but also for the BSLS itself, where dramatic and powerfully innovative diagonals cut across existing understandings to pursue new channels of knowledge.

In late March, delegates gathered for the third annual conference of the British Society for Literature and Science in the magnificent surroundings of Keele Hall. Following previous successful meetings in Glasgow and Birmingham, over sixty participants, including plenary speakers, PhD students, professors, and poets, joined together to hear presentations on topics from computer-generated poetry to ‘lice-men and logarithms’, earthquakes and fairy-land.

In the opening plenary, Helen Small (Pembroke College, Oxford) went to the heart of the matter, setting the agenda for the rest of the conference: are the humanities and sciences still distinctly two cultures? The problem in the humanities, she pointed out, is its perceived irrelevance: could the answer lie in a coherent methodology which equated truthfulness with sincerity and accuracy? She asked whether literature is capable of giving a systematic account of science, exploring the question with revealing readings of poems by the immunologist, Miroslav Holub, and Nobel chemist Roald Hoffman.

The speakers in panel 4 explored ways in which eighteenth-century discoveries in natural philosophy shaped a number of literary texts. Darren Wagner (Saskatchewan) explored notions of pre-formation in Gulliver’s Travels. Greg Lynall (Liverpool) put a persuasive case for Richard Bentley’s 1693 ‘physico-logical’ sermons attacking atheism as the motor for Swift’s satire in A Tale of a Tub. Sam George (Hertfordshire) considered the writings of women botanists that tempered the account of botanical promiscuity in Erasmus Darwin’s Loves of the Plants.

On Friday morning Mary Noble (Princeton) discussed anthropological theories and marriage in relation to instinct, barbarism, and Jude the Obscure. Encarnacion Trinidad Barrantes (Open University, Ireland) then considered the scope of the scientific eye as she explored Oliver Wendall Holmes’ ‘medicated gaze’. Does science, as Holmes claimed, ‘delineate in monochrome?’ Helena Ifill (Sheffield) gave a fascinating introduction to the anatomisation and conflation of ‘natural’ and ‘ideal’ women in John Marchmont’s Legacy.

The benefits that attention to a nuanced history of science can bring to literary studies was apparent in panel 10’s pair of papers on geology, which urged scholars to move beyond the topics of investigation that originally defined our interdisciplinary field. For example, Adelene Buckland (Cambridge) claimed that an emphasis not on narrative grand theories but rather on the relative status of local and provincial expertise, on stratigraphical researches, and on material culture and practices, can tease out more complex interpretive frames for plots, characters, and descriptions; in this case bringing together the work and lives of Thomas Hardy and palaeontologist Gideon Mantell. In his presentation, Gowan Dawson (Leicester) hoped to ‘be fair’ to Richard Owen, moving beyond Darwinian obsession to an understanding of the relationships between serial publishing and the sequential scientific process of correlating parts to whole (thigh bone to model Moa) which formed the basis of Owen’s work. The managed monthly plot and the articulated skeleton could then themselves be fitted together.

In the day’s plenary Frank Close (Exeter College, Oxford) gave an engaging introduction to some aspects of astrophysics, and notions of nothingness. Asking why we can’t hear the sun, whether space really is empty, and demonstrating how not to winch a car out of an Irish dock, he gave his audience much to ponder. He revealed his own sources of inspiration, including childhood puzzles and the Rig Veda, and posited that we may all be here on ‘borrowed’ time and energy.

Alan Rauch (North Carolina) and Alice Jenkins (Glasgow) provided a relaxed hour before the conference reception and dinner, exploring how knowledge was communicated in the Romantic period through private subscription libraries and the Literary and Philosophical Societies.

On Saturday Stephen Connor (London Consortium) directed his own penetrating critical gaze to the subject of X-rays. Ranging amongst hair-removal treatments, ‘flesh made light’ photography, Punch’s graveyard humour, and even how Superman failed his medical for the US Army, his conception of ‘permeation’ as the defining characteristic of modernity led to an amazing array of topics. The dream of sensory augmentation and transparency, he concluded, was only achieved through visible images and objects: a ‘multi-dimensional thinking’ about familiar reality. More generally, his talk provoked us to consider our own use of prepositions in ‘seeing through’ subjects: should our field be literature and science, science as literature, or science through literature?

This was followed by poetry readings from Deryn Rees-Jones and Helen Clare on ‘signs around a dead body’, the creatures that lurk in murky tanks at the back of biology labs, or why the world might have ended on Helen’s wedding day. Particularly striking were the ingenious strategies used in composing these works – from e-mail surveys of friends’ feelings for snow to quite literal and intricate interweavings of lines.

A couple of minor points: access to paper abstracts, either in printed form or online, would be a great help , as would inclusion of participants’ email addresses on the delegates list.

Overall, sincere thanks are due to Sharon Ruston for her impeccable organisational skills, and to everyone at Keele for ensuring events ran so smoothly. We look forward to next year’s conference in Reading, and to the rumoured theatricals…

Delegates can register online now.