Perera, Nirshan (Author)
University of California, Santa Cruz
Jordan, John O.
Edition Details: Advisor: Jordan, John O.
Physical Details: 154 pp.
Language: English
This dissertation examines how Charles Dickens's last completed novels, which appeared after the publication of Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species (1859), process Victorian anxieties about evolutionary origins and connections. I argue that Dickens's thematic work with origins and identity--specifically in Great Expectations (1860-61) and Our Mutual Friend (1864-65)--ultimately transcends the epistemological dislocations of Darwinism through an affirmation of self-determination and development over biological determination and origins. I examine how this is registered most powerfully in the novels' emphasis on the liberatory and redemptive nature of self-narration and narrative fantasy. Furthermore, I read this aesthetic assertion as Dickens's developing response to Darwinian evolutionary theory and a bridge between the social commentary of his last two completed novels. This aesthetic counterpositioning demonstrates how Dickens's engagement with Darwinian science was complex and richly contradictory. I begin by summarizing and synthesizing Goldie Morgentaler's and Anny Sadrin's key work on issues of heredity and parentage in Dickens's oeuvre. As Morgentaler and Sadrin have argued, Dickens's work before 1859 primarily articulates a deterministic vision of cohesion and continuity in personal and social identity. Dickens's treatment of self-formation, however, becomes increasingly critical of hereditary determinants and undergoes a radical unraveling in his post- Origin work. Building on Morgentaler's and Sadrin's work, among others, I argue that Great Expectations is ultimately unable to harmonize the deterministic tenets of evolutionary theory with the liberatory desires that underwrite any act of self-narration. Retrospective narration becomes a site for remaking origins and identity through the fruitful distortions of storytelling. Dickens's next and last finished novel, Our Mutual Friend, extends and heightens this work. I present an extended reading and recontextualization of the lengthy soliloquy that bisects the book--in which the central character hijacks the narrative authority of the novel's third-person omniscient narrator and seeks to remake himself through a conspicuous act of self-narration. The Harmon soliloquy grapples with issues of origin and predestination and privileges even more emphatically the self-germinating potential of the individual over hereditary and environmental determinants.
...MoreDescription Cited in ProQuest Diss. & Thes. . ProQuest Doc. ID 1035153116.
Similar Citations
Book
Michael Ruse;
(2016)
Darwinism as Religion: What Literature Tells Us about Evolution
(/isis/citation/CBB247868178/)
Book
Brown, William;
Fabian, Andrew C.;
(2010)
Darwin
(/isis/citation/CBB001023129/)
Thesis
Cherico, Rebecca Vitz;
(2004)
The Struggle with Darwin in the Turn-of-the-Century Spanish Novel: Emilia Pardo Bazan, Miguel de Unamuno, and Pio Baroja
(/isis/citation/CBB001562038/)
Book
Prochiantz, Alain;
(2010)
Darwin, 200 ans
(/isis/citation/CBB001024540/)
Chapter
Jones, Steve;
(2010)
The Evolution of Utopia
(/isis/citation/CBB001023134/)
Chapter
Compagnon, Antoine;
(2010)
Darwin en littérature
(/isis/citation/CBB001024555/)
Article
White, Paul;
(2010)
Science, Literature, and the Darwin Legacy
(/isis/citation/CBB001022440/)
Book
Richter, Virginia;
(2011)
Literature after Darwin: Human Beasts in Western Fiction, 1859--1939
(/isis/citation/CBB001033151/)
Thesis
Michael Dee;
(2016)
Roots of Charles Darwin's Creativity
(/isis/citation/CBB344704069/)
Thesis
Picker, John Martin;
(2001)
Hearing things: Sound in the Victorian imagination, 1848-1900
(/isis/citation/CBB001560933/)
Article
Fulweiler, Howard W.;
(1994)
“A dismal swamp”: Darwin, design, and evolution in Our mutual friend
(/isis/citation/CBB000043159/)
Article
Bown, Nicola;
(2010)
What the Alligator Didn't Know: Natural Selection and Love in Our Mutual Friend
(/isis/citation/CBB001022453/)
Chapter
Barri J. Gold;
(2017)
Chaotic Fictions: Nonlinear Effects in Victorian Science and Literature
(/isis/citation/CBB086255881/)
Article
Bayley, Mel;
(2007)
Hard Times and Statistics
(/isis/citation/CBB000831565/)
Book
McInnis, Gilbert;
(2011)
Evolutionary Mythology in the Writings of Kurt Vonnegut: Darwin, Vonnegut and the Construction of an American Culture
(/isis/citation/CBB001033149/)
Article
Murphy, Ruth;
(2012)
Darwin and 1860s Children's Literature: Belief, Myth or Detritus
(/isis/citation/CBB001213305/)
Article
Gross, Daniel M.;
(2010--2011)
Defending the Humanities with Charles Darwin's The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872)
(/isis/citation/CBB001033582/)
Chapter
Stott, Rebecca;
(2010)
Darwin in the Literary World
(/isis/citation/CBB001023131/)
Book
A. Hunter Dupree;
(1988)
Asa Gray: American Botanist, Friend of Darwin
(/isis/citation/CBB638090619/)
Book
R. Paul Thompson;
(2015)
A Remarkable Journey: The Story of Evolution
(/isis/citation/CBB549807336/)
Be the first to comment!