Twenty years ago Virginia Woolf's oeuvre expanded significantly. Of course between her death and 1992, many essays had been published posthumously, as had letters, diaries, and autobiographical writings. But 1992 saw the arrival of ten new novels by Woolf, maybe twenty. In addition to the plain, unannotated editions that many of us had first read, whether published by the Hogarth Press, Penguin, Grafton, or Harcourt Brace, there appeared affordable annotated editions from Oxford University Press, in their World's Classics imprint, and from Penguin, as Twentieth-Century Classics. (Excellent annotations have also appeared in the Shakespeare Head and the Hogarth Definitive editions, but, as editions intended for the scholarly library market, these did not have the same impact as their paperback counterparts). In addition to Mrs Dalloway (1925), by Virginia Woolf, we discovered two new novels, Mrs Dalloway with annotations by Elaine Showalter, and Mrs Dalloway with annotations by Claire Tomalin; in 2000 followed a fourth new Woolf novel, Mrs Dalloway with annotations by David Bradshaw.

I suspect I was not alone in having mixed feelings when I began to teach and to write using the new texts. While the dominant feeling was one of delight and excitement at having such a resource to use and to share with students, there was also a sentimental regret at the practical nuisance of having to lay aside familiar copies, unannotated by any scholarly editor, but full of one's own underlinings and marginal comments. There was also embarrassment at realising that one had not asked the kinds of questions that the annotators had asked, that one had not read Woolf's novels as carefully and as thoroughly as they deserved. But more importantly, there was a worrying suspicion that annotation was not pure gain; that there was a more complicated economy at work in which, by gaining a sharper sense of Woolf's historical referents, particularly in relation to the topography of London, one lost, or at least found it harder to focus on, Woolf's artistry, her formal patterning.

In a well known passage, Mikhail Bakhtin wrote that ‘all words have the “taste” of a profession, a genre, a tendency, a party, a particular work, a particular person, a generation, an age group, the day and hour’ (1981, 293). Compared with the subtle social distinctions that Bakhtin alludes to, one might expect the flavour of scientific vocabulary to stand out very vividly; but verbal flavours lose their distinctiveness over time, and in any case, some poets like to exploit terms that are already polysemous and which belong to no single professional tongue. The investigation of scientific terms in poetry must be historical, and in an ideal scenario must avail itself of evidence of reception. Even an historical dictionary like the Oxford English Dictionary is insufficiently nuanced; we are interested less in what the OED declares to have been a scientific usage than in what the audience for any given poem believed.

Reception evidence can guide us in other ways which may become increasingly important for literary criticism. For many years, critics interested in scientific diction in poetry have relied on serendipitous findings in the process of lifetimes of wide reading. A comparison such as Robert Crawford's of the uses of ‘uterine’ (in Chapter 4 of the present volume) is only rarely possible. In coming decades, the digitisation of poetry (both in and out of copyright) should make such searches very easy to achieve. But coming into possession of a rich corpus of material places a greater onus on the critic to ask the right questions of it. An examination of the reception history of such poetry not only provides clues as to what counted as ‘scientific’, but offers suggestions as to the aesthetic issues raised by the use of science in poetry. The present chapter will survey such historical material, before offering five questions that may prove productive, at least in relation to twentieth-century material; the questions will be discussed in relation to poems and phrases from Michael Roberts, William Empson and Hugh MacDiarmid. The questions concern the utility of science, its historical changeability, the relative authority of the first-person lyric voice, the dual status of science as texts and as ideas, and the discursive environment in which the scientific ideas find themselves.

In a well known passage, Mikhail Bakhtin wrote that ‘all words have the “taste” of a profession, a genre, a tendency, a party, a particular work, a particular person, a generation, an age group, the day and hour’ (1981, 293). Compared with the subtle social distinctions that Bakhtin alludes to, one might expect the flavour of scientific vocabulary to stand out very vividly; but verbal flavours lose their distinctiveness over time, and in any case, some poets like to exploit terms that are already polysemous and which belong to no single professional tongue. The investigation of scientific terms in poetry must be historical, and in an ideal scenario must avail itself of evidence of reception. Even an historical dictionary like the Oxford English Dictionary is insufficiently nuanced; we are interested less in what the OED declares to have been a scientific usage than in what the audience for any given poem believed.

Reception evidence can guide us in other ways which may become increasingly important for literary criticism. For many years, critics interested in scientific diction in poetry have relied on serendipitous findings in the process of lifetimes of wide reading. A comparison such as Robert Crawford's of the uses of ‘uterine’ (in Chapter 4 of the present volume) is only rarely possible. In coming decades, the digitisation of poetry (both in and out of copyright) should make such searches very easy to achieve. But coming into possession of a rich corpus of material places a greater onus on the critic to ask the right questions of it.

Context is a matter of weaving together, but there is more than one way of weaving. When considering Eliot's relation to natural science, is a metaphor of human weaving appropriate, one in which science forms part of the warp and weft of Eliot's thinking? Or might the spider's web offer a better metaphor for an antagonistic relationship, a metaphor in which fragments of science are not threads in the web, but the bodies of insects? Of course, both models might be equally true: the thread that flows from the spider's spinneret contains the digested bodies of past victims. Contemporary science was readily available to Eliot through many sources, but it would be a mistake with a writer so alertly critical of the culture in which he lived to assume that he uncritically absorbed it. Equally, it would be a mistake to assume that he was uniformly hostile to it, though some models of modernism have assumed this to be the case.

In Eliot's first published volume of poetry, science is immediately present as a source of vocabulary which disrupts the reader's expectations: the patient ‘etherised’ (CPP, 13) in the third line of ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’. In one of his most significant early essays, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, the comparison of the poet's mind to a platinum catalyst is likewise placed prominently; in the original publication, the metaphor concluded the first instalment in the September 1919 issue of the Egoist, and, having hung in the air for a few months, was resumed at the start of the next instalment.

On 27 June 1925, as she completed To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf's concerns with stylistic and formal innovation were displaced by a concern with the literary marketplace. The phrase Woolf contemplates for her latest work was apparently intended as advertising copy; a book's title page would not have referred to it as 'new'. Had she classified To the Lighthouse as an 'elegy', as the diary entry goes on to suggest, she would have given it a place in literary tradition, but she would also have given it a generic category. Her later decision to subtitle Orlando 'a biography' resulted in some bookshops failing to display it alongside other fiction (D3, p. 198), and, in the longer term, may have contributed to its exclusion from the canon of her novels. The literary marketplace valued innovation, but its emphasis on the uniqueness of each new work was opposed by a deeper tendency to view the book as a commodity, and all commodities as interchangeable. And from the perspective of the market, even uniqueness is ultimately valuable only because it makes the commodity more marketable.

The aesthetic phenomenon of modernism needs to be understood in its relation to the social and historical phenomena of modernity, and Woolf's modernism is no exception; the difficulty is that no single definition of modernity is entirely adequate. Woolf’s diary for 27 June 1925 vividly illuminates the interface between formally innovative writing and the commercial orientation of modernity. But this was by no means the first point of contact: the work, like all modernist works, was not conceived in isolation from modernity, but in dialogue with it; sometimes in reaction against modernity, sometimes drawing aspects of modernity into its form and texture. Woolf may be compared to her modernist contemporaries by virtue of this dialogue, but differentiated from them in its details and tone.