American Scientists and Their Fictions: Professional Authorship and Intellectual Identity, 1870–1900

Abstract

A note on versions:The version presented here may differ from the published version or from the version of record. If you wish to cite this item you are advised to consult the publisher's version. Please see the repository url above for details on accessing the published version and note that access may require a subscription. This version is free to view and download for private research and study only. Not for redistribution, re-sale or use in derivative works. Published version will be available at:https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-american-studies. 3 usually unmistakable earmarks of authorship," and the article was, "much more likely to have been produced by a man whose business does not lie among books and pens." Such judgments were intended as praise. By dispensing with the self-conscious "touch of the artist," McGee's piece was seen to foreground "the psychology of tormenting thirst" to greater effect than a more self-consciously "professional" literary work. with literary preoccupations ranging from semi-fictionalized sketches of travel and exploration to novels, short stories, poetry, and verse drama. These scientist-authors were simultaneously constrained by and sought to resist the separation of scientific and literary modes of intellectual work, and in so doing sustained a significant if fragile hybrid literary-scientific culture. As the nineteenth century drew to a close this zone of cultural exchange was fractured amid the institutional pressures of specialization and the economic imperatives of the marketplace, which recast literary and scientific life according to new professional norms. The scientists discussed here sought in various ways to mitigate these tendencies, but ultimately found their modes of intellectual labour antithetical to the emerging literary culture of professional authorship. American Scientists and theirLiterature, Science, and the Professionalization of Intellect 9 There are abundant illuminating studies of the influence of science on literary culture, but they focus predominantly on established literary figures' engagement with science, rather than established scientists' engagements with literature.