Interdisciplinarity » (1st Edition)

Joe Moran is Reader in Cultural History at Liverpool John Moores University. His books include Reading the Everyday (2005) and On Roads: A Hidden History (2009), and he is also a regular contributor to the New Statesman, the Guardian and the Financial Times.

Interdisciplinarity covers one of the most important changes in attitude and methodology in the history of the university.

Taking the study of English as its main example, this fully updated second edition examines the ways in which we have organized knowledge into disciplines, and are now reorganizing it into new configurations as existing structures come to seem restrictive. Joe Moran traces the history and use of the term ‘interdisciplinarity’, tackling such vital topics as:

• the rise of the disciplines


• interdisciplinary English


• Literary and Cultural Studies


• 'theory' and the disciplines


• texts and histories


• literature and science, space and nature.

Including an updated further reading section and new concluding chapter, Interdisciplinarity is the ideal entry point into one of today's most heated critical debates.

Victorian Poetry

And as I discussed two years ago in this column, the Routledge "New Critical Idiom" series offers some excellent overviews of significant terms and topics in contemporary theory.