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Thesis ID: CBB001560857

Making the Fittest Culture: Social Darwinism and American Naturalist Writing at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (2003)

University of Kansas
Lester, Cheryl

Publication Date: 2003
Edition Details: Advisor: Lester, Cheryl
Physical Details: 191 pp.
Language: English

Outside Links

Academia.edu

Social Darwinism Science and literature Evolution 20th century, early United States Wharton, Edith London, Jack Adams, Henry

I explore Jack London, Edith Wharton, and Henry Adams's portrayal of evolution as a cultural narrative, a narrative open to multiple and conflicting interpretations. Going beyond the rather narrow readings of social Darwinism offered by most naturalist scholars, I show that the lack of a scientific consensus about the definition of social Darwinism (for it could, I argue, be seen as any cultural application of evolutionary theory) and its social value, enabled London, Wharton, and Adams to have a more significant voice in debates about social Darwinism than scholars have allowed. The first chapter addresses how neither older nor more recent approaches have identified the multiple interpretations of social Darwinism and the strategies that these writers use to evaluate them; the following chapters examine how each writer tests the ideological assumptions that shape the social meanings of evolutionary theory. Chapter two considers London's argument in _ The Call of the Wild_ (1903) for biological kinship between humans and dogs and how this argument is informed by the violence of national history---the conquering of the frontier---and dreams of national expansion. Chapter three focuses on how Edith Wharton's _The House of Mirth_ (1905) challenges London's acceptance of scientific principles for human behavior by showing the ways that debates about natural selection and the biological inheritance of memories and behaviors are informed by dominant cultural assumptions about class and gender. Chapter four examines Henry Adams's _The Education of Henry Adams_ (1907) and later scientific essays, showing his frequent shifting between evolution and physics to develop a scientific reading of history which questions evolutionary progress. These writers, individually and collectively, not only capture a particularly contentious moment in the development of evolutionary thought in American society, but also shed light on how the meanings of evolution become freighted with cultural values and attitudes.

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Description Focus on the American writers Jack London, Edith Wharton, and Henry Adams. Cited in Diss. Abstr. Int. A 65/04 (2004): 1367. UMI pub. no. 3130554.

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