Taking as a starting point the embeddedness of all disciplinary and interdisciplinary inquiry - since interdisciplinarity is itself not a unitary phenomenon but encompasses many different knowledge practices embedded in widely differing political, economic and ideological constituencies - the essays in this volume explore in different ways some of the conversations currently taking place across disciplinary boundaries in the exciting new field of literature and science. Like literature, science is seen as a site of competing ideological constructions, as a complex (and richly ambiguous) element of modern (and postmodern) social discourse, circulating in a wider cultural community where its currency fluctuates according to complex changes in social and epistemic conditions, including the relative prestige or cultural capital of 'science' (or 'literature') within professional and disciplinary hierarchies at any given time.