Literature in the Wake of the ‘Two Cultures’ Debate is a literary-historical research project that makes a significant contribution to knowledge in the fields of literary and cultural studies with a particular focus on ‘genre fiction’ and the role of ‘science’ in the cultural imaginary.

The project investigates an ideological shift in the cultural reception of science and the arts that took place over the course of one pivotal decade in British history. On May 7, 1959, the scientist-turned-novelist C.P. Snow delivered the annual Reid Lecture at the University of Cambridge in which he lamented the division of intellectual life into ‘two cultures’, the arts and sciences.

[1] His lecture generated widespread discussion until February 1962, when the literary critic F.R. Leavis challenged Snow’s thesis in another Cambridge lecture.

[2] What this brief outline does not convey is the polemical intensity that so charged the controversy.

This project seeks to explain British cultural politics in the wake of the ‘two cultures’ debate by investigating the ways in which literary authors responded to the challenge to traditional disciplinary boundaries initiated by Snow. In particular, British literature from 1958 to 1969 displays the conflicting ideologies, both elitist and egalitarian, in ways that problematise assumptions about the social function of science and the arts. Rather than reading ‘science’ or ‘the arts’ as stable entities, frozen in one moment in time, this project investigates the ways in which the literature of the period registers and shapes the shifting associations of those domains. Indeed, it poses fundamental questions concerning power in British society and the ways in which the discourse of science has influenced questions of war and peace, nation and empire, gender and sexuality, class, and political allegiance.