Introduction

Abstract

Science-and-literature studies are a relatively new endeavour, having emerged as a main topic in the last decades, especially in the Anglo-American academy, but also in other academic traditions (Willis 2014). The proposal of some exponents of this emergent field is to erase the boundaries between science and culture and, by extension, between nature and society. The latter was initiated in the Early Modern episteme by Thomas Hobbes and Robert Boyle, as Bruno Latour suggests in We Have Never Been Modern (1993, 47), quoting Leviathan and the Air Pump by Simon Schaffer and Steven Shapin. Although during the whole twentieth century, in English-speaking academia, the relationship between science and literature was not negligible, especially with poetry, as Lance Schachterle very well describes in the introduction of the Encyclopedia of Literature and Science (Gossin 2002). This dialogue started to become particularly intense during the last decades of the twentieth century. The claim for a dialogue is at the centre of Order out of Chaos (1984), written by physicist Ilya Prigogine and historian of science Isabelle Stengers to overcome the separation between the two cultures denounced by C. P. Snow (1959). During the first decades of the twenty-first century, the field has strongly developed frommultiple and different perspectives. Important handbooks on science-and-literature studies have been published, such as Pamela Gossin’s Encyclopedia of Literature and Science (2002), crafted as an introduction for students, instructors and interdisciplinary scholars in an encyclopaedic manner, or The Routledge Companion to Literature and Science (2011), edited by Bruce Clarke and Manuela Rossini, focused on the humanistic perspective and dedicated primarily to literature in English. Other publications have compiled the academic interaction and dialogue between scientists, writers, artists and humanists, such as #Nodos (2017), edited by Gustavo Schwartz and Víctor Bermúdez. Furthermore, recently different academic institutions launched several projects on science-and-literature studies. From a European perspective, one should mention the ambitious project developed around Bremen and Oldenburg in north-western Germany, Fiction Meets Science (FMS). FMS constructs a dialogue between experts in science studies (sociologist, historians) and experts in literary studies, including