Charles Darwin's profound interest in Austen's novels—Persuasion (1817) in particular—is well known. This article offers a new interpretation of Persuasion as a pre-Darwinian novel, concerned with the processes of natural selection and evolution in human societies. Many of the discoveries and theories that Darwin drew on in developing his work on evolution came about in the late eighteenth century. We are accustomed to reading Victorian literature in a Darwinian context, but research into the impact of geological and paleontological discoveries on the literature of the romantic period is scant, despite explicit references in, for example, Shelley's Prometheus Unbound (1820) and Charlotte Smith's Beachy Head (1807). In Persuasion, Austen offers examples of successful evolution, and also of the failure of some individuals to survive in their environments. Sir Walter Elliot, Austen writes, “had not had principle or sense enough to maintain himself in the situation in which Providence had placed him.” The romantics' newly formed understanding of the process of extinction, led by a growth in the study of fossils, forms the background to this novel in which Austen radically questions the desirability of the very existence of the British landowning classes, concluding: “They were gone who deserved not to stay.” Austen's ultimate ambivalence about the survival of her culture's values and even its members takes on new significance when read in light of novels that import romantic tropes of exile in the face of ecological cataclysm.
...More
Article
Beer, Gillian;
(2009)
Darwin and the Uses of Extinction
(/isis/citation/CBB001030096/)
Article
Marco Tamborini;
(2015)
Paleontology and Darwin’s Theory of Evolution: The Subversive Role of Statistics at the End of the 19th Century
(/isis/citation/CBB570146507/)
Essay Review
Ana Barahona;
(2016)
Non-Darwinian Evolutionary Thought in the 19th Century
(/isis/citation/CBB575980081/)
Book
Prochiantz, Alain;
(2010)
Darwin, 200 ans
(/isis/citation/CBB001024540/)
Chapter
Wilmer, Clive;
(2013)
“No Such Thing as a Flower […] No Such Thing as a Man”: John Ruskin's Response to Darwin
(/isis/citation/CBB001422077/)
Thesis
Michael Dee;
(2016)
Roots of Charles Darwin's Creativity
(/isis/citation/CBB344704069/)
Book
Graham, Peter W.;
(2008)
Jane Austen and Charles Darwin: Naturalists and Novelists
(/isis/citation/CBB000774595/)
Book
Dawson, Gowan;
(2007)
Darwin, Literature and Victorian Respectability
(/isis/citation/CBB000774026/)
Book
Purton, Valerie;
(2013)
Darwin, Tennyson and Their Readers: Explorations in Victorian Literature and Science
(/isis/citation/CBB001421851/)
Article
Talairach-Vielmas, Laurence;
(2013)
Extinction and Progress in Charles Kingsley's Alton Locke (1850)
(/isis/citation/CBB001201777/)
Article
Novoa, Adriana;
(2009)
The Act or Process of Dying Out: The Importance of Darwinian Extinction in Argentine Culture
(/isis/citation/CBB000932754/)
Book
Jeff Karnicky;
(2016)
Scarlet Experiment: Birds and Humans in America
(/isis/citation/CBB488937827/)
Article
Inkpen, S. Andrew;
(2014)
“The art itself is nature”: Darwin, Domestic Varieties and the Scientific Revolution
(/isis/citation/CBB001500031/)
Chapter
Dawson, Gowan;
(2013)
“Like a Megatherium Smoking a Cigar”: Darwin's Beagle Fossils in Nineteenth-Century Popular Culture
(/isis/citation/CBB001422076/)
Article
Derek Partridge;
(2018)
Darwin’s Two Theories, 1844 and 1859
(/isis/citation/CBB074913080/)
Book
Glick, Thomas F.;
(2010)
What about Darwin? All Species of Opinion from Scientists, Sages, Friends, and Enemies Who Met, Read, and Discussed the Naturalist Who Changed the World
(/isis/citation/CBB001031334/)
Article
Curtis N. Johnson;
(2019)
Charles Darwin, Richard Owen, and Natural Selection: A Question of Priority
(/isis/citation/CBB684893999/)
Book
Thierry Hoquet;
(2018)
Revisiting the Origin of Species: The Other Darwins
(/isis/citation/CBB118384970/)
Book
Johnson, Dirk R.;
(2010)
Nietzsche's Anti-Darwinism
(/isis/citation/CBB001023122/)
Article
Smith, Charles H.;
(2005)
Alfred Russel Wallace, Past and Future
(/isis/citation/CBB001035141/)
Be the first to comment!