The Evolution of Literature : Legacies of Darwin in European Cultures.

Intro -- The Evolution of Literature: Legacies of Darwin in European Cultures -- Contents -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction: The Evolution of Literature -- The Law of Higgledy-pigglety: Charles Darwin's Inheritance, his Legacy and the Moral Order of Nature -- 'Our Racial Friends': Disease, Poverty and Social Darwinism, 1860-1940 -- From Primate to Human in Two Easy Steps -- Charles Darwin's Centenary and the Politics and Poetics of Parenting: Inheritance, Variation, and the Aesthetic Legacy of Samuel Butler -- By An Evolutionist: Poetic Language in Chambers and Tennyson -- Victorian Evolutionary Criticism and the Pitfalls of Consilience -- H.G. Wells's The Time Machine and the End of Literature -- Mind in Modern Fiction: Literary and Philosophical Perspectives after Darwin -- E-Volutionary Fictions: The Darwinian Algorithm in Literature and Computer Games -- Value Judgements and Functional Roles: Carroll's Quarrel With Pinker -- The Book of Nature: Biosemiotics and the Evolution of Literature -- Men, Monkeys, Monsters and Evolution in Fiction from the Fin-de-siècle to the Present -- Zola and Darwin: A Reassessment -- On the Evolution of Humanity and the Oppressions of Darwinism in French Postwar Fiction -- Houellebecq, Genetics and Evolutionary Psychology -- 'Once in Human Nature, a Thing Cannot be Driven Out': Evolutionary Aesthetics in Wilhelm Jensen's The Legacy of Blood (1869). An Early Response to Darwin -- 'Live like a Man and not like a Monkey': Nietzsche's Philosophic Vitalism and Darwin's Theory of Evolution -- 'Creative Evolution': Bergson's Critique of Science and its Reception in the German-Speaking World -- Evolutionary Psychology as a Heuristic in Literary Studies -- Contributors -- Index.

Daniel Dennett famously claimed for Darwinian theory the status of universal solvent: the totalising theory of theories, even of theories of literature. Yet only a few writers and critics have followed his view. This volume asks why. It examines both evolution in literature, and the evolution of literature. It looks at literary representations of Darwinism both historically and synchronically, at how a theory of literature might be derived from evolutionary theory, and indeed how evolution as a process might be regarded as itself aesthetic. It complements these theoretical and historical dimensions of enquiry with the comparative dimension. It asks in short: What have been the representations of Darwinian evolutionary theory in literature since the late nineteenth century? What are the leading paradigms in theory and in literature for renovating the evolutionary model? What were, and are, the differences in British, French, German paradigms of literary Darwinian reception? How, if at all, did Darwinian modes of thought hybridise across national borders? Last, but not least: What is the future of the Darwinian mode?.

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Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, Michigan : ProQuest Ebook Central, 2024. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ProQuest Ebook Central affiliated libraries.