The novel and other disciplines

Lawrence 's description of the novel genre as “the highest example of subtle interrelatedness that man has discovered” encapsulates the dialogisms, hybridities, intertextualities, double voicings, and focalization that are celebrated by recent academic criticism. Scholarship thereby constructs the novel as a capacious house, not only full of many windows, but also built ergonomically, with a range of recycled materials. Of course, the novel has never respected disciplinary boundaries, national frontiers, or well-tilled fields and plots; but in the twentieth century its tendencies have seemed ever more promiscuous, democratic, and miscegenated. Novelists, like public intellectuals, have roamed free of academic practices (even when those practices appear not to be restrictive), borrowing and stealing at will, mixing and meshing, parodying and inverting official discourses of knowledge.

Popular science and philosophy, earlier in the century and again from the late 1970s on, after the publication of Richard Dawkins's The Selfish Gene (1976), have been similarly free ranging, making new ideas easily available to readers. In the earlier part of the century, new scientific ideas were liberated from academically circumscribed contexts, and made accessible in Arthur Eddington's The Nature of the Physical World (1928) and James Jeans's The Mysterious Universe (1930). Popular series like the Home University Library of Modern Knowledge (from 1911) conveyed Einstein, Russell, Jeans, Eddington, Freud, Bergson, and Nietzsche to a new and educationally aspirational middle class.