Book Prize

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Nominations are now being accepted for the BSLS Book Prize 2021. Inaugurated in 2007, the annual British Society for Literature and Science book prize is awarded for the best book in the field of literature and science published that year. Any book is eligible, but can only be considered if it is nominated either by a member of BSLS or by its publisher. Publishers are very welcome to nominate their own books, and members may nominate their own titles. Please note that individual memberships must be current and the publication in question must be dated 2021 to be eligible. Members of the BSLS committee are not eligible for the Prize. A panel of BSLS executive committee members and scholars will read all submissions, with the winner announced at our 2022 conference. Please send all nominations to Emily Alder on bslsbookprize@gmail.com by 31 December 2021.

For a list of past winners and shortlisted titles, see here.

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The BSLS is delighted to announce the winner of its Book Prize for 2020: Biofictions: Race, Genetics and the Contemporary Novel (Bloomsbury Academic) by Josie Gill.

Josie Gill’s study of race and genetics in late twentieth and early twenty-first century fiction is critically engaged with science and its contexts, lucidly written, and politically urgent. Covering novels by, among others, Zadie Smith, Kazuo Ishiguro, Octavia Butler, and Colson Whitehead, it argues that the idea of race in genetic science is a biofiction, ‘an idea constituted through the complex entanglement of scientific and fictive forms.’ It takes in the sciences relevant to ancestry, human genomic diversity, epigenetics, and examines their relations to the changing social contexts for concepts of ‘race’ and anti-racist politics. In doing so, it illuminates how concepts of ‘race’ remain latent even when contemporary genetic science seems to have undermined the concept. Wearing its scholarship lightly, this outstanding study welcomes both the specialist in contemporary literature, the general reader, and, we hope, readers from the sciences.

Biofictions is available on open access funded by Knowledge Unlatched.

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The British Society for Literature and Science is pleased to announce the shortlist for the 2020 book prize. The five shortlisted books are (alphabetically by author's surname):

Will Abberley, Mimicry and Display in Victorian Literary Culture: Nature, Science and the Nineteenth-Century Imagination (CUP)

Andrea Charise. The Aesthetics of Senescence: Aging, Population, and the Nineteenth-Century British Novel (SUNY Press)

Josie Gill, Biofictions: Race, Genetics and the Contemporary Novel (Bloomsbury Academic)

Tom Nurmi, Magnificent Decay: Melville and Ecology (University of Virginia Press)

Sara Wasson, Transplantation Gothic: Tissue transfer in literature, film, and medicine (Manchester University Press)

The prize of £150 will be awarded to the best book published in 2020 in the field of literature and science. The winner will be announced at this year's online conference.

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Nominations are now being accepted for the BSLS Book Prize 2020. Inaugurated in 2007, the annual British Society for Literature and Science book prize is awarded for the best book in the field of literature and science published that year. Any book is eligible, but can only be considered if it is nominated either by a member of BSLS or by its publisher. Publishers are very welcome to nominate their own books, and members may nominate their own titles. Please note that individual memberships must be current and the publication in question must be dated 2020 to be eligible. Members of the BSLS committee are not eligible for the Prize. A panel of BSLS executive committee members and scholars will read all submissions, with the winner announced at our 2021 online conference. Please send all nominations to Michael Whitworth on bslsbookprize@gmail.com by 31 December 2020.

For a list of past winners and shortlisted titles, see here.

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The winner of the BSLS Book Prize for 2019 was announced yesterday at the Society's online conference: it is Gerard Passannante's Catastrophizing: Materialism and the Making of Disaster (University of Chicago Press)

Gerard Passannante’s timely study brings together literature, visual art, and the history of science to provide rich insights into catastrophic thinking and the history of materialist thought. His accounts of analogy and of the juxtaposition of incompatible scales will be stimulating to readers working across a wide range of periods. His key idea is that the image of disaster renders the imperceptible perceptible. The book takes in Lucretian materialism, Leonardo da Vinci, John Donne, the idea of interpretation ‘anything out of anything’ (quidlibet ex quolibet), Shakespeare, Robert Hooke and microscopes, the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, and – in a suggestive Afterword – our current climate crisis. It has foundations of precise historical scholarship, but is informed by a wider range of historical knowledge, such that Sergei Eisenstein can inform a discussion of Leonardo da Vinci, or Samuel Beckett provides the opening to a chapter on Shakespeare.

Further details of the book prize, and of past winners and shortlisted titles, are given here.

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The British Society for Literature and Science is pleased to announce the winner of its annual book prize. The prize of £150, for the best monograph or collection of essays published in 2008, has been awarded to George Levine for Realism, Ethics and Secularism: Essays on Victorian Literature and Science (Cambridge University Press). The book prize committee commented as follows:

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.

The winner was announced at the Society’s annual conference in Reading. For a review, see George Levine, Realism, Ethics and Secularism.

The other shortlisted books were:

  • Armstrong, Isobel. Victorian Glassworlds (Oxford University Press, 2008)
  • Jackson, Noel. Science and Sensation in Romantic Poetry (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism, no.73) (Cambridge University Press, 2008)
  • Reiss, Benjamin. Theaters of Madness: Insane Asylums and Nineteenth-Century American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2008)

The prize was inaugurated last year, when it was awarded to Ralph O’Connor for The Earth on Show (University of Chicago Press, 2007). Books are ineligible if written by, or contain contributions by, members of the BSLS’s executive committee or the book prize committee.

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The British Society for Literature and Science is pleased to announce the shortlist for the 2008 book prize. The four shortlisted books are:

  • Armstrong,Isobel. Victorian Glassworlds (Oxford University Press, 2008)
  • Jackson, Noel. Science and Sensation in Romantic Poetry (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism, no.73) (Cambridge University Press, 2008).
  • Levine, George Lewis. Realism, ethics and secularism : essays on Victorian literature and science (Cambridge University Press, 2008)
  • Reiss, Benjamin. Theaters of Madness: Insane Asylums and Nineteenth-Century American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2008)

The prize of £150 will be awarded to the best book published in 2008 in the field of literature and science. The winner will be announced at this year's conference at Reading University.

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The British Society for Literature and Science is pleased to invite nominations for the annual BSLS Book Prize.

The prize of £150 will be awarded to the best book published in 2008 in the field of literature and science. We therefore invite nominations, including self-nominations, for books to be considered. Monographs, edited volumes, editions, and books of creative writing are all eligible for consideration. The book must be in English and must have ‘2008’ as its publication date.

Please send nominations, including author, title and publisher to Dr Michael Whitworth (book-prize convenor) at michael.whitworth@merton.ox.ac.uk, with ‘BSLS Book Prize’ as the subject heading. The deadline for receipt of nominations is 16 January 2009.

• The book prize was launched in 2007; the winner of the first prize was Ralph O’Connor, for The Earth on Show: Fossils and the Poetics of Popular Science, 1802-1856 (U of Chicago P, 2007)

• Nominations are invited from society members and from publishers. The authors or editors of the nominated books need not be members of the society.

• The winner of this year’s prize will be announced at the BSLS’s 2009 conference in Reading

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The committee of the BSLS is delighted to announce that Ralph O'Connor's book The Earth on Show: Fossils and the Poetics of Popular Science, 1802-1856 (U of Chicago P, 2007) has been awarded the Society's first book prize. The book is a deeply-researched, ambitious and elegant account of early nineteenth-century literary and scientific writing on geology. It is likely to prove long-lasting and to be informative and stimulating to specialist scholars as well as to a wider readership.

The prize citation for The Earth on Show was written by the President of the BSLS, Professor Dame Gillian Beer:
"Ralph O'Connor's The Earth on Show is at once spectacular and judicious. He demonstrates the ways earth science declared itself to broad audiences during the Victorian period. He does so by exploring the immense variety of visual display, from panoramas to museums to illustrated books and cartoons. Alongside these examples he analyses how writing also can be made to perform discoveries. These two sources of evidence come together in a
richly argued, very readable, and innovative account that shows a new science making itself by making itself known. Chicago University Press has done a brilliant job, and so has the author."

The shortlist for the book prize (see below) was extremely strong: the six books addressed very different topics, demonstrating some of the breadth of this field, but were all based on detailed, wideranging and original research. Congratulations to all six authors, and above all to Ralph O'Connor.

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The committee of the BSLS is delighted to announce the shortlist for the Society's annual prize for the best book on literature and science published the previous calendar year. The prize is awarded for the first time this year, and the winner will be announced at the conference in Keele at the end of March.

Jonathan Adams, Interference Patterns: Literary Study, Scientific Knowledge, and Disciplinary Autonomy (Bucknell University Press)

Gowan Dawson, Darwin, Literature, and Victorian Respectability (Cambridge University Press)

Mark Francis, Herbert Spencer and the Invention of Modern Life (Acumen Publishing)

Elizabeth Leane, Reading Popular Physics: Disciplinary Skirmishes and Textual Strategies (Ashgate Publishing)

James Mussell, Science, Time and Space in the Late Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press: Movable Types (Ashgate Publishing)

Ralph O'Connor, The Earth on Show: Fossils and the Poetics of Popular Science, 1802-1856 (University of Chicago Press)

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