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Thesis ID: CBB001561289

The Probability of Progress: Resisting History in Galton and Modern Fiction, 1869--1936 (2007)

Cannariato, Christy A. (Author)

University of California, Santa Barbara
Abbott, H. Porter

Publication Date: 2007
Edition Details: Advisor: Abbott, H. Porter
Physical Details: 236 pp.
Language: English

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Evolution Genetics Science and literature Eugenics 20th century, early 19th century Galton, Francis

The Probability of Progress tracks the evolution of Francis Galton's work in heredity and statistics and in particular emphasizes the compensations his theories required in order to satisfy and express his idealism. Despite his earlier assumptions that hereditary progress is enacted by a steady linear progression of improvement, and visible results attainable in just three generations, Galton discovered the Law of Regression, which demonstrated that offspring tend to revert back to the population mean for any given characteristic. Given this new model of rigid determinism, Galton found himself ironically seeking a method to evade the determinism he himself had promoted Galton as a result turned away from the conventional model of evolutionary gradualism toward the aleatory saltationist model, and this study tracks his shifting valuations of chance and determinism. Chapters 2 through 4 examine the ubiquitous pairing of heredity and chance in the following fin-de-siècle novels: George Moore's Esther Waters , E.M. Forster's Howards End , and John Galsworthy's The Forsyte Saga. Centered on issues of hereditary progress, these novels offer judgments about modernity as they grapple with the loss of the perceived safety, gradualism, and determinism of the Victorian Age and its replacement with the risk, speed, and chance of the approaching twentieth century. Chapter 3 analyzes the anxious comparisons of the fading British Empire to fallen ancient empires and the rhetorical use by eugenicists of their assertions about the rise-and-fall tendency of nature and of history. This two- pronged narrative strategy of both promoting and resisting historical determinism is similarly evident in Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! Chapter 4 examines Galton's attempt at utopian fiction and theorizes about the consequences of achieving the end of progress in narrative, literary fiction, and history Achieving stasis is the goal of utopianists, and this chapter examines H.G. Wells's effort in A Modern Utopia to avoid stasis and petrification by openly embracing chance.

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Description Cited in Diss. Abstr. Int. A 68/10 (2008). Pub. no. AAT 3283682.

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