Scientific Americans: The Making of Popular Science and Evolution in Early-Twentieth-Century U.S. Literature and Culture by John Bruni

Reviewed by: Scientific Americans: The Making of Popular Science and Evolution in Early-Twentieth-Century U.S. Literature and Culture by John Bruni Dominik Ohrem (bio) John Bruni, Scientific Americans: The Making of Popular Science and Evolution in Early-Twentieth-Century U.S. Literature and Culture. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2014, 272 pp. $145.00 cloth. “Science and literature are not two things, but two sides of one thing,” the English biologist Thomas H. Huxley supposedly remarked in an after-dinner speech in 1860. This conviction of science and literature as essentially “one thing” was not uncommon among Huxley’s contemporaries and was also evident in the lack of any clear distinction in nineteenth-century print culture between what Charles P. Snow would, almost one hundred years later, famously refer to as the “Two Cultures” of the sciences and the humanities. As numerous scholars have since argued, not only are the kinds of strict disciplinary divisions that Snow’s analysis relied on far from given, but in fact a rather recent twentieth-century invention. Snow’s rigid dualism also failed to account for the immense diversity of perspectives and epistemologies within these anything-but-monolithic fields of knowledge and practice. In reaction to these debates, throughout the last decades numerous studies have endeavored to move beyond this dichotomous way of thinking about the sciences and the humanities, focusing on the many interfaces, intersections, and forms of reciprocity between scientific research and the broader cultural sphere, including works of philosophy, literature, and art. The intricate ways in which scientific inquiry is inevitably suffused by historically specific sociocultural, political, and economic parameters and the contexts of its reception as well as the equally important ways in which scientific debates feed back into the (popular) cultural discourses of their time are at the heart of John Bruni’s Scientific Americans. Published in the University of Wales Press’s “Intersections in Literature and Science” series, Bruni’s book can be counted among recent works that seek to provide historically specific reassessments of the interrelations between scientific thought and literary culture. His book situates itself in key early twentieth-century scientific debates about evolution and investigates the way in which these debates shaped, and were shaped by, contemporary popular science journalism and literary (naturalist) writing. With his discussion of articles published in the American popular science journals Scientific American and Popular Science Monthly between 1895 and 1910, the literary naturalism of Theodore Dreiser, Edith Wharton, and Jack London, as well as Henry Adams’s influential autobiographical work The Education of Henry Adams, Bruni shows that these writings, far from functioning merely as passive receptacles or mirrors of contemporary scientific theories, incorporated contemporary science on their own terms, opening up an often ambiguous and contentious discursive space in which scientific thought was actively challenged, reimagined, appropriated, or experimented [End Page 253] with. What connects the chapters in Bruni’s book, some of which are revised versions of previously published material, is the way in which evolutionary theory has to be understood as a dynamic construction, “formulated over time through interdisciplinary discussions … that reappraise the connections between scientific and social realms” (p. 2). Far from existing in a sphere of their own, evolutionary and other scientific discourses are defined by their constant intersections with the overlapping domains of culture, politics, and economics, as Bruni emphasizes in his discussion of evolutionary theory’s complex role in early twentieth-century thought. In the book’s first chapter, Bruni shows that popular science journalism was a crucial part of “science in the making” (p. 4) and thus played a role not merely in the circulation but also in the active construction of evolutionary thought, as contemporary Americans—including the writers discussed by Bruni—grappled with its supposed social and political implications in an era defined by imperialist and capitalist expansion, mass immigration, social reform, and the persistence (or intensification) of the connections between questions of race, class, gender, and citizenship. The book’s initial chapter lays much of the groundwork for the subsequent readings both in its general discussion of the inseparability of the spheres of the social and the scientific and, more specifically, in the way it complicates...