Literature After Darwin

What makes us human? Where is the limit between human and animal? These are questions that haunt post-Darwinian literature. Covering fiction from Kipling to Kafka, this study offers a historically embedded analysis of anthropological anxiety in the period between the publication of the Origin of Species and the beginning of the Second World War.

This book explores the philosophy and writings of Charles Darwin and their contribution to theories of philosophy, evolution, and beauty.

The ancient form of the animal fable, in which the characteristics of humans and animals are playfully and educationally intertwined, took on a wholly new meaning after Darwin's theory of evolution changed forever the relationship between humans and animals. In this original study, Chris Danta provides an important and original account of how the fable was adopted and re-adapted by nineteenth- and twentieth-century authors to challenge traditional views of species hierarchy. The rise of the biological sciences in the second half of the nineteenth century provided literary writers such as Robert Louis Stevenson, H. G. Wells, Franz Kafka, Angela Carter and J. M. Coetzee with new material for the fable. By interrogating the form of the fable, and through it the idea of human exceptionalism, writers asked new questions about the place of the human in relation to its biological milieu.

‘What is emotion?’ pondered the young Charles Darwin in his notebooks. How were the emotions to be placed in an evolutionary framework? And what light might they shed on human-animal continuities? These were among the questions Darwin explored in his research, assisted both by an acute sense of observation and an extraordinary capacity for fellow feeling, not only with humans but with all animal life. After Darwin: Animals, Emotions, and the Mind explores questions of mind, emotion and the moral sense which Darwin opened up through his research on the physical expression of emotions and the human–animal relation. It also examines the extent to which Darwin’s ideas were taken up by Victorian writers and popular culture, from George Eliot to the Daily News. Bringing together scholars from biology, literature, history, psychology, psychiatry and paediatrics, the volume provides an invaluable reassessment of Darwin’s contribution to a new understanding of the moral sense and emotional life, and considers the urgent scientific and ethical implications of his ideas today.

An anthology of essential writings that cover some of the most influential ideas about the philosophical implications of Darwinism, since the publication of "On the Origin of Species".

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?

A major critical reassessment of the fable and of the literary representation of the human-animal relationship after Darwin.

Creative storytelling is the beating heart of Darwin's science. All of Darwin's writings drew on information gleaned from a worldwide network of scientific research and correspondence, but they hinge on moments in which Darwin asks his reader to imagine how specific patterns came to be over time, spinning yarns filled with protagonists and antagonists, crises, triumphs, and tragedies. His fictions also forged striking new possibilities for the interpretation of human societies and their relation to natural environments. This volume gathers an international roster of scholars to ask what Darwin's writing offers future of literary scholarship and critical theory, as well as allied fields like history, art history, philosophy, gender studies, disability studies, the history of race, aesthetics, and ethics. It speaks to anyone interested in the impact of Darwin on the humanities, including literary scholars, undergraduate and graduate students, and general readers interested in Darwin's continuing influence.