MonographDOI
The Descent of Love: Darwin and the Theory of Sexual Selection in American Fiction, 1871-1926
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Bender as mentioned in this paper studied the impact of Charles Darwin's theories in American literature and found that it is this treatise on sexual selection, rather than any of Darwin's earlier works on evolution, that provoked the most immediate and vigorous response from American fiction writers.Abstract:
Upon its publication in 1871, Charles Darwin's The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex sent shock waves through the scientific community and the public at large. In an original and persuasive study, Bert Bender demonstrates that it is this treatise on sexual selection, rather than any of Darwin's earlier works on evolution, that provoked the most immediate and vigorous response from American fiction writers. These authors embraced and incorporated Darwin's theories, insights, and language, creating an increasingly dark and violent view of sexual love in American realist literature. In The Descent of Love, Bender carefully rereads the works of William Dean Howells, Henry James, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Sarah Orne Jewett, Kate Chopin, Harold Frederic, Charles W. Chesnutt, Edith Wharton, and Ernest Hemingway, teasing from them a startling but utterly convincing preoccupation with questions of sexual selection. Competing for readership as novelists who best grasped the "real" nature of human love, these writers also participated in a heated social debate over racial and sexual differences and the nature of sex itself. Influenced more by The Descent of Man than by the Origin of Species, Bender's novelists built upon Darwin's anthropological and zoological materials to anatomize their character's courtship behavior, returning consistently to concerns with physical beauty, natural dominance, and the power to select a mate. Bringing the resources of the history of science and intellectual history to this, the first full-length study of the impact of Darwin's theories in American literature, Bender revises accepted views of social Darwinism, American literary realism, and modernism in American literature, forever changing our perceptions of courtship and sexual interaction in American fiction from 1871 to 1926 and beyond.read more
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Book
Capture: American Pursuits and the Making of a New Animal Condition
TL;DR: In this paper, Traisnel argues that the desire to capture animals in representation responded to and normalized the systemic disappearance of animals effected by unprecedented changes in the land, the rise of mass slaughter, and the new awareness of species extinction.
DissertationDOI
Evolutionary landscapes: Adaptation, selection and mutation in 19th century literary ecologies
TL;DR: A gradualist focus on textual silence and extinction within literary history, through the lens of evolutionary and ecological theory, can reveal the complex ecology of oral, cultural, written, printed and reprinted information that constitutes the soft tissues always missing from the archival past as mentioned in this paper.
Dissertation
Ineradicable humanity : literary responses to Darwin in Zola, Hardy, and the utopian novel
Abstract: This dissertation is a comparative study of the evolutionary thought of Charles Darwin and a constellation of novels from the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries which examines how these works respond to and explore the existential death blow delivered to humanity by Darwin’s theory of evolution. In doing so, this work joins a vibrant discursive field in literary criticism about the relationship between Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution and literature, both in the nineteenth century and beyond. The dominant methodology in this field seeks to illuminate the historical and discursive context in which literary culture and Darwinian science co-existed and focuses on the period contemporaneous with and immediately after the emergence of Darwinian evolutionary science. Building on this methodology, I argue that, as well as recognising the intertextual and historical cross-correspondences between literary writing and Darwin’s theories, it is important and critically fruitful to consider the ways that literary writing supplements Darwin’s thought, submitting it to a range of interrogations, questions, complications, and transformations. I explore how works by Émile Zola stage an inquiry into the relation between scientific objectivity and art and wonder about the possibility of transcending the biological determinism of natural selection; how two works by Thomas Hardy respond to the nihilism of an evolutionary cosmology with a radical vision of Darwinian sexual
Journal ArticleDOI
Agassiz or Darwin: Faith and Science in Hemingway's High School Zoology Class
TL;DR: Hemingway did indeed receive extensive exposure to Darwinian science in his high school zoology class in 1915-16 as discussed by the authors, and the truth lies in the very Darwinian textbook for the class as well as the fascinating laboratory notebook Hemingway kept for the course, which has gone largely unnoticed in the Monroe County Public Library in Key West.