摘要：The five papers in this roundtable originated in a plenary session at the seventh annual conference of the British Society for Literature and Science in 2012 at the University of Oxford. Since the foundation of the BSLS, the papers presented at its conferences and the books reviewed on its website have been very largely historicist in their approach, following a tradition that goes back to the earlier work of critics such as George Rousseau on the eighteenth century, Gillian Beer and George Levine on the nineteenth century, and Ian F. A. Bell on modernism (each of whom has either spoken at or been honoured by the BSLS itself). Given the dominance of historicism in this field, especially in Britain, we felt that it was important to examine its conceptual possibilities and methodological demands. What, we wanted to ask, are the specific challenges for historicism in literature and science, as distinct from those facing historicism more generally. Why might historicism be both particularly crucial and particularly vexed in our field. What difference, ultimately, does it make that we are working on science, which is not only an immensely complex cultural phenomenon but an authoritative body of knowledge and a highly effective set of methods for generating understanding in its own right
