Conflict, Complexity, and T. H. Huxley’s Literary Reading

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>The history of the relations between science and literature has been characterized more by conflict than convergence. It was only with the development of literature and science as an academic subfield in the 1980s that their creative interaction became the dominant focus, although this so-called One Culture model has more recently been challenged and new areas of difference and tension explored. This chapter seeks to move beyond both the revived interest in discord and the erstwhile emphasis on mutuality. Drawing on the modern historiography of science and religion, it adopts the “complexity thesis,” which enjoins contextual sensitivity and rigorous empirical analysis as a means of avoiding a priori assumptions about either conflict or harmony. As a case study in using this approach, the chapter examines the literary reading of Thomas Henry Huxley. Huxley’s famous dispute with Matthew Arnold helped confirm the oppositional relation of science and literature, but his own scientific positions, on human evolution especially, were forged through his reading of literature. Notably, Huxley’s reading practices were predicated on conflict, and it is only by tracing his shifting tastes—for Carlyle, Thackeray, and Dickens—that his conception of science and literature can be recovered in its full complexity.</jats:p>