Episode 4 - Tell it Like a Story

LitSciPod: The Literature and Science Podcast

Produced by: Catherine Charlwood (@DrCharlwood) and Laura Ludtke (@lady_electric)

Music composed and performed by Gareth Jones

Laura and Catherine are joined by a special guest: Dr Will Abberley (@WillAbberley), Lecturer in Victorian Literature at the University of Sussex. In addition to discussing #litsci aspects of his research and teaching, Will also explores language in scientific writings, biology and the imagination, human effects on the environment, and the importance of communicating to a broad public.

At the end of the episode, you can hear Will read Grant Allen’s article ‘Strictly Incog’ from the Cornhill Magazine, Vol. 8, No. 44 (Feb 1887): 142-57.

Episode resources:

Books mentioned:

• Meredith Hooper, The Pebble in my Pocket: A History of Our Earth (Viking Children’s Books, 1996)
• Adelene Buckland, Novel Science: Fiction and the Invention of Nineteenth-Century Geology (University of Chicago Press, 2013)
• Adelene Buckland, ‘Thomas Hardy, Provincial Geology and the Material Imagination,’ 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, (6), DOI: http://doi.org/10.16995/ntn.469.
• Gideon Mantell, The Wonders of Geology, 6th ed., 1848
• Thomas Hardy, A Pair of Blue Eyes (Tinsley Brothers, 1883)
• Michael R. Page, The Literary Imagination from Erasmus Darwin to H.G. Wells: Science, Evolution, and Ecology (Ashgate, 2012)
• Laura Ludtke, ‘MICHAEL R. PAGE, The Literary Imagination from Erasmus Darwin to H. G. Wells: Science, Evolution, and Ecology,’ Notes and Queries, Vol, 62, No. 3, (Sep 2015): 480–82, https://doi.org/10.1093/notesj/gjv110

Websites of interest:

• Narrative Science project at the London School of Economics, https://www.narrative-science.org

We hope you’ve enjoyed this episode of LitSciPod - we enjoyed making it!