Duncan, Ian (Author)
A major rethinking of the European novel and its relationship to early evolutionary scienceThe 120 years between Henry Fielding's Tom Jones (1749) and George Eliot's Middlemarch (1871) marked both the rise of the novel and the shift from the presumption of a stable, universal human nature to one that changes over time. In Human Forms, Ian Duncan reorients our understanding of the novel's formation during its cultural ascendancy, arguing that fiction produced new knowledge in a period characterized by the interplay between literary and scientific discourses—even as the two were separating into distinct domains.Duncan focuses on several crisis points: the contentious formation of a natural history of the human species in the late Enlightenment; the emergence of new genres such as the Romantic bildungsroman; historical novels by Walter Scott and Victor Hugo that confronted the dissolution of the idea of a fixed human nature; Charles Dickens's transformist aesthetic and its challenge to Victorian realism; and George Eliot's reckoning with the nineteenth-century revolutions in the human and natural sciences. Modeling the modern scientific conception of a developmental human nature, the novel became a major experimental instrument for managing the new set of divisions—between nature and history, individual and species, human and biological life—that replaced the ancient schism between animal body and immortal soul.The first book to explore the interaction of European fiction with "the natural history of man" from the late Enlightenment through the mid-Victorian era, Human Forms sets a new standard for work on natural history and the novel.
...MoreReview H.-F. Dessain (2020) Review of "Human Forms: The Novel in the Age of Evolution". British Journal for the History of Science (pp. 285-287).
Book
Lynn Festa;
(2021)
Fiction Without Humanity: Person, Animal, Thing in Early Enlightenment Literature and Culture
(/isis/citation/CBB396379434/)
Thesis
Matthew Robert Sherrill;
(2016)
Forms of Life: Evolution and Poetic Form in the British Long Nineteenth Century
(/isis/citation/CBB649997265/)
Thesis
Rose O'Malley;
(2018)
Darwin's Failures: Childless Women in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel
(/isis/citation/CBB766029324/)
Book
Brycchan Carey;
Sayre Greenfield;
Anne Milne;
(2020)
Birds in Eighteenth-Century Literature: Reason, Emotion, and Ornithology, 1700–1840
(/isis/citation/CBB640839629/)
Chapter
Saul, Nicholas;
(2011)
“Once in Human Nature, a Thing Cannot be Driven Out”: Evolutionary Aesthetics in Wilhelm Jensen's The Legacy of Blood (1869). An Early Response to Darwin
(/isis/citation/CBB001202038/)
Book
Carroll, Joseph;
(2004)
Literary Darwinism: Evolution, Human Nature, and Literature
(/isis/citation/CBB000641437/)
Article
Hamlin, Christopher;
(2012)
Charles Kingsley: From Being Green to Green Being
(/isis/citation/CBB001211492/)
Thesis
Kurtis Hessel;
(2017)
Poetry and Chemistry, 1770-1830: Mingling Exploded Systems
(/isis/citation/CBB787342305/)
Thesis
Michael Verderame;
(2017)
Science, Politics, and Soul-Making: The Romantic Encounter with Climate Change
(/isis/citation/CBB568976028/)
Book
Pamela K. Gilbert;
(2019)
Victorian Skin: Surface, Self, History
(/isis/citation/CBB642139556/)
Article
Dustin Hellberg;
(2019)
Close Encounters of the Tertiary Kind: Science Fiction as Tertiary Epic
(/isis/citation/CBB184221896/)
Thesis
Rachel Mann;
(2019)
Women’s Writing and The Poetics of Scientific Knowledge, 1620-1740
(/isis/citation/CBB067590891/)
Article
Gunhild Berg;
(2019)
Experimenters Versus Magicians: Poetic Strategies of an Intertextual Rivalry in 19th Century German Fiction
(/isis/citation/CBB799424382/)
Book
Richard Fallon;
(2021)
Reimagining Dinosaurs in Late Victorian and Edwardian Literature: How the ‘Terrible Lizard' Became a Transatlantic Cultural Icon
(/isis/citation/CBB569188287/)
Thesis
Diana Rose Newby;
(2022)
Passive Life: Vitalism and British Fiction, 1820-1880
(/isis/citation/CBB233336823/)
Book
Alessio Bottone;
(2022)
Settecento dialogico. Scienza, militanza, letteratura
(/isis/citation/CBB407856342/)
Article
Tita Chico;
(2017)
Putrefaction as Optical Technology
(/isis/citation/CBB459042924/)
Thesis
Mo Li;
(2017)
Science and Edgar Allan Poe's Pathway to Cosmic Truth
(/isis/citation/CBB849763322/)
Article
Greg Priest;
(2018)
Diagramming Evolution: The Case of Darwin’s Trees
(/isis/citation/CBB389269041/)
Article
Andrea Charise;
Devoney Looser;
David McAllister;
Ruth M. McAdams;
Jacob Jewusiak;
Travis Chi Wing Lau;
(2021)
Bending the Clock: New Perspectives on Nineteenth-Century Ageing: A Roundtable Conversation
(/isis/citation/CBB956259833/)
Be the first to comment!