Disciplinarity at the Fin de Siècle

This collection of 12 essays focuses on the era of the late 1800s in Great Britain, Germany, France and America. The contributors examine the genealogy of various disciplines and challenge the story of disciplinary formation as solely one of consolidation, constraint and ideological justification.

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Contemporary celebrations of interdisciplinary scholarship in the humanities and social sciences often harbour a distrust of traditional disciplines, which are seen as at best narrow and unimaginative, and at worst complicit in larger forms of power and policing. This book questions these assumptions by examining the rise of a select number of academic disciplines in an historical perspective. This collection of 12 essays focuses on the late Victorian era in Great Britain but also on Germany, France and America in the same formative period. The contributors - James Buzard, Lauren M.E. Goodlad, Liah Greenfeld, John Guillory, Simon Joyce, Henrika Kuklick, Christopher Lane, Jeff Nunokawa, Arkady Plotnitsky, Ivan Strenski, Athena Vrettos and Gauri Viswanathan - examine the genealogy of various fields including English, sociology, economics, psychology and quantum physics. Together with the editors' introduction, they challenge the story of disciplinary formation as solely one of consolidation, constraint and ideological justification.
Addressing a broad range of issues - disciplinary formations, disciplinarity and professionalism, disciplines of the self, discipline and the state and c