Literature After Darwin

Abstract

Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture is a new monograph series that aims to represent the most innovative research on literary works that were produced in the English-speaking world from the time of the Napoleonic Wars to the fin de siècle. Attentive to the historical continuities between 'Romantic' and 'Victorian', the series will feature studies that help scholarship to reassess the meaning of these terms during a century marked by diverse cultural, literary, and political movements. The main aim of the series is to look at the increasing influence of types of historicism on our understanding of literary forms and genres. It reflects the shift from critical theory to cultural history that has affected not only the period 1800-1900 but also every field within the discipline of English literature. All titles in the series seek to offer fresh critical perspectives and challenging readings of both canonical and non-canonical writings of this era.

Siriusly Concerned: Animal Non-Belongingness in a Dichotomized Environment

“…The former has rapidly gained international attention as nonhuman animals start to be considered a figure of Otherness, apart from its evident social impact in the questions of our time (Richter, 2011). Specifically, literary animal studies seek a (re)evaluation of the animal figure, paying close attention to the different modes of representation from allegoric animals to metaphoric to postmodernist.…”

‘The unknown region that lies beyond the Gray’s Inn Road’: Evolutionary Anxiety in the Country and the City in Arthur Machen's <i>The Green Round</i>

“…The relationship between anthropological anxiety and colonial discourse is made explicit; indeed, the temporal and geographical dimensions mentioned above are often difficult to separate, since 'in colonial discourse, the temporal axis is projected onto the geographical axis, i.e. contemporary "primitive peoples" are seen as living in the evolutionary past' , 9 effectively being considered -as Carole G. Silver has pointed out -as living missing links. 10 John Glendening, writing in 2007, emphasises the 'decentering' of the human accomplished by evolutionary theory, and its wide-ranging implications, touching as it did 'upon equally complicated cultural issues -religious, philosophical, economic, and political' .…”

“…7 Richter goes on to consider the ways in which post-Darwinian texts wrestle with the blurring of boundaries between self and Other -both temporally (through the anxiety of reversion to an ape-like, pre-human state) and geographically ('the fear of "going native"' , losing the distinction between 'European self ' and an 'exotic Other' identified with the primitive). 8 She discusses the relation of these fears to various cultural and literary tropes -the missing link, the ape-like human or human-like ape, the lost world and the possibility of degeneration. The relationship between anthropological anxiety and colonial discourse is made explicit; indeed, the temporal and geographical dimensions mentioned above are often difficult to separate, since 'in colonial discourse, the temporal axis is projected onto the geographical axis, i.e.…”

Dreaming of islands: individuality and utopian desire in post-Darwinian literature

“…Wells ' The Island of Dr. Moreau (2005[1896) via Giorgio Agamben's (1998) concept of 'bare life', Richter (2011) recognizes in the novel's eugenically synthesized hybrid animals a kind of uncanny, abject evolutionary horror. Half-man and half-beast, these beings are liminal and transgressive, a kind of life which, according to Agamben (1998, p. 109), is "not simply natural reproductive life, the zoē of the Greeks, nor bios, a qualified form of life," but is "the bare life of homo sacer and the wargus, a zone of indistinction and continuous transition between man and beast, nature and culture."…”