At the close of the eighteenth century, Erasmus Darwin declared that he would 'enlist the imagination under the banner of science', beginning, Michael Page argues, a literary narrative on questions of evolution, ecology, and technological progress that would extend from the Romantic through the Victorian periods. Examining the interchange between emerging scientific ideas - specifically evolution and ecology - new technologies, and literature in nineteenth-century Britain, Page shows how British writers from Darwin to H.G. Wells confronted the burgeoning expansion of scientific knowledge that was radically redefining human understanding and experience of the natural world, of human species, and of the self. The wide range of authors covered in Page's ambitious study permits him to explore an impressive array of topics that include the role of the Romantic era in the molding of scientific and cultural perspectives; the engagement of William Wordsworth and Percy Shelley with questions raised by contemporary science; Mary Shelley's conflicted views on the unfolding prospects of modernity; and, how Victorian writers like Charles Kingsley, Samuel Butler, and W.H. Hudson responded to the implications of evolutionary theory. Page concludes with the scientific romances of H.G. Wells, to demonstrate how evolutionary fantasies reached the pinnacle of synthesis between evolutionary science and the imagination at the close of the century.
...MoreReview Suzanne L. Barnett (2014) Review of "The Literary Imagination from Erasmus Darwin to H.G. Wells: Science, Evolution, and Ecology". Nineteenth-Century Contexts (pp. 287-290).
Review Parrinder, Patrick (2013) Review of "The Literary Imagination from Erasmus Darwin to H.G. Wells: Science, Evolution, and Ecology". Science-Fiction Studies (p. 172).
Thesis
Page, Michael R.;
(2008)
“Continual Food for Discovery and Wonder”: Science and the Nineteenth-Century British Literary Imagination from Erasmus Darwin to H. G. Wells
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Stiles, Anne;
(2009)
Literature in Mind: H. G. Wells and the Evolution of the Mad Scientist
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Otto, Peter;
(2011)
Inside the Imagination-Machines of Gothic Fiction: Estrangement, Transport, Affect
(/isis/citation/CBB001201376/)
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Holmes, Richard;
(2008)
The Age of Wonder
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Jim Endersby;
(2016)
Deceived by Orchids: Sex, Science, Fiction and Darwin
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Cheng, John;
(2012)
Astounding Wonder: Imagining Science and Science Fiction in Interwar America
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Carlo Paghetti;
(2014)
I scientific romances di H.G. Wells: variazioni sul tema dello scienziato darwiniano
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Hitchcock, Susan Tyler;
(2007)
Frankenstein: A Cultural History
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Jones, Steve;
(2010)
The Evolution of Utopia
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Kreisel, Deanna K.;
(2014)
The Discreet Charm of Abstraction: Hyperspace Worlds and Victorian Geometry
(/isis/citation/CBB001550339/)
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Choo, Jae-uk;
(2014)
Uneasy Hybridity: The Nature and Culture of Science, and Its Bioethical Implications in Select Victorian Fiction
(/isis/citation/CBB001567656/)
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McLean, Steven;
(2009)
The Early Fiction of H. G. Wells: Fantasies of Science
(/isis/citation/CBB000952806/)
Chapter
Markley, Robert;
(2008)
The Nightmare of Evolution: H. G. Wells, Percival Lowell and the Legacies of Frankenstein's Science
(/isis/citation/CBB000760400/)
Thesis
Seligo, Carlos R.;
(1996)
The origin of science fiction in the monsters of botany: Carolus Linnaeus, Erasmus Darwin, Mary Shelley
(/isis/citation/CBB001565697/)
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Knellwolf, Christa;
Goodall, Jane R.;
(2008)
Frankenstein's Science: Experimentation and Discovery in Romantic Culture, 1780--1830
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Bowerbank, Sylvia Lorraine;
(2004)
Speaking for Nature: Women and Ecologies of Early Modern England
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Parham, John;
(2010)
Dickens in the City: Science, Technology, Ecology in the Novels of Charles Dickens
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Dahlia Porter;
(2018)
Science, Form, and the Problem of Induction in British Romanticism
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Hale, Piers J.;
(2010)
Of Mice and Men: Evolution and the Socialist Utopia. William Morris, H. G. Wells, and George Bernard Shaw
(/isis/citation/CBB000933103/)
Chapter
Hermans, Cor;
(2010)
Looking for Utopia---Guided by Evolution? The Case of the Fabians
(/isis/citation/CBB001021563/)
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