The Historical Science Novel and the Narrative of an Emergent Scientific Discourse

Abstract

This paper offers an analysis of three historical science novels, John Banville 's Kepler (1981), Tracy Chevalier's Remarkable Creatures (2009), and Clare Dudman's Wegener 's Jigsaw (2003), to address a number of interrelated questions that cover, for example, specific features of the genre, the narrative mode employed as well as its epistemic advantage, and the fictional integration of an emergent scientific discourse. While Banville's Kepler establishes a close affinity between the mathematical, the aesthetic and the narrative form, Chevalier's neoRomantic novel Remarkable Creatures makes full use of alternating first-person narratives to highlight the exceptional friendship of the historical fossil hunters Mary Anning and Elizabeth Philpot at a time when palaeontology was about to become a scientific discipline. The third novel, Clare Dudman's imagined autofiction Wegener's Jigsaw, uses an autodiegetic narrator and a device that I refer to as 'mentor-mentee constellation' to facilitate a narrative transmission which guarantees that Alfred Wegener and his continental drift theory will find favour with the readership when he falls victim to oppressive scientific discourse.

Of Blackboards and Bathrooms: Space as Metaphor for Power Relations in Hidden Figures (2016)

“…As Taylor and Spicer outline, the great value of viewing space as physical manifestation of power relations lies in moving away "from a focus on how surface manifestations of organized spaces operate," and instead considering "the reasons why spaces are configured as they are" (332). To Norbert Schaffeld (2016), "the dominant distribution of scientific space" in science narratives can give insight into gendered exclusions from areas where new knowledge is produced (182).…”