The Evolutionary Imagination In Late Victorian Novels

Author : John Glendening
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317032470
Total Pages : 234 pages
Book Rating : 4.72/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book The Evolutionary Imagination in Late-Victorian Novels written by John Glendening and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-16 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dominated by Darwinism and the numerous guises it assumed, evolutionary theory was a source of opportunities and difficulties for late Victorian novelists. Texts produced by Wells, Hardy, Stoker, and Conrad are exemplary in reflecting and participating in these challenges. Not only do they contend with evolutionary complications, John Glendening argues, but the complexities and entanglements of evolutionary theory, interacting with multiple cultural influences, thoroughly permeate the narrative, descriptive, and thematic fabric of each. All the books Glendening examines, from The Island of Doctor Moreau and Dracula to Heart of Darkness, address the interrelationship between order and chaos revealed and promoted by evolutionary thinking of the period. Glendening's particular focus is on how Darwinism informs novels in relation to a late Victorian culture that encouraged authors to stress, not objective truths illuminated by Darwinism, but rather the contingencies, uncertainties, and confusions generated by it and other forms of evolutionary theory.

Author : John Glendening
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317032462
Total Pages : 281 pages
Book Rating : 4.65/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book The Evolutionary Imagination in Late-Victorian Novels written by John Glendening and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-16 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dominated by Darwinism and the numerous guises it assumed, evolutionary theory was a source of opportunities and difficulties for late Victorian novelists. Texts produced by Wells, Hardy, Stoker, and Conrad are exemplary in reflecting and participating in these challenges. Not only do they contend with evolutionary complications, John Glendening argues, but the complexities and entanglements of evolutionary theory, interacting with multiple cultural influences, thoroughly permeate the narrative, descriptive, and thematic fabric of each. All the books Glendening examines, from The Island of Doctor Moreau and Dracula to Heart of Darkness, address the interrelationship between order and chaos revealed and promoted by evolutionary thinking of the period. Glendening's particular focus is on how Darwinism informs novels in relation to a late Victorian culture that encouraged authors to stress, not objective truths illuminated by Darwinism, but rather the contingencies, uncertainties, and confusions generated by it and other forms of evolutionary theory.

Author : Jessica Straley
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1107127521
Total Pages : 271 pages
Book Rating : 4.24/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Evolution and Imagination in Victorian Children's Literature written by Jessica Straley and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-06-06 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An interdisciplinary study that explores the impact of evolutionary theory on Victorian children's literature.

Author : John Holmes
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
ISBN 13 : 1317042344
Total Pages : 466 pages
Book Rating : 4.41/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book The Routledge Research Companion to Nineteenth-Century British Literature and Science written by John Holmes and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2017-05-18 with total page 466 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tracing the continuities and trends in the complex relationship between literature and science in the long nineteenth century, this companion provides scholars with a comprehensive, authoritative and up-to-date foundation for research in this field. In intellectual, material and social terms, the transformation undergone by Western culture over the period was unprecedented. Many of these changes were grounded in the growth of science. Yet science was not a cultural monolith then any more than it is now, and its development was shaped by competing world views. To cover the full range of literary engagements with science in the nineteenth century, this companion consists of twenty-seven chapters by experts in the field, which explore crucial social and intellectual contexts for the interactions between literature and science, how science affected different genres of writing, and the importance of individual scientific disciplines and concepts within literary culture. Each chapter has its own extensive bibliography. The volume as a whole is rounded out with a synoptic introduction by the editors and an afterword by the eminent historian of nineteenth-century science Bernard Lightman.

Author : Trenton B. Olsen
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 0429640641
Total Pages : 182 pages
Book Rating : 4.43/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Wordsworth and Evolution in Victorian Literature written by Trenton B. Olsen and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-12-07 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The influences of William Wordsworth’s writing and evolutionary theory—the nineteenth century’s two defining visions of nature—conflicted in the Victorian period. For Victorians, Wordsworthian nature was a caring source of inspiration and moral guidance, signaling humanity's divine origins and potential. Darwin’s nature, by contrast, appeared as an indifferent and amoral reminder of an evolutionary past that demanded participation in a brutal struggle for existence. Victorian authors like Matthew Arnold, George Eliot, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Thomas Hardy grappled with these competing representations in their work. They turned to Wordsworth as an alternative or antidote to evolution, criticized and altered his poetry in response to Darwinism, and synthesized elements of each to propose their own modified theories. Darwin’s account of a material, evolutionary nature both threatened the Wordsworthian belief in nature’s transcendent value and made spiritual elevation seem more urgently necessary. Victorian authors used Wordsworth and Darwin to explore what form of transcendence, if any, could survive an evolutionary age, and reevaluated the purpose of literature in the process.

Author : Tim Youngs
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 1846319587
Total Pages : 237 pages
Book Rating : 4.87/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Beastly Journeys written by Tim Youngs and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bats, beetles, wolves, butterflies, bulls, panthers, apes, leopards and spiders are among the countless creatures that crowd the pages of literature of the late nineteenth century. Whether in Gothic novels, science fiction, fantasy, fairy tales, journalism, political discourse, realism or naturalism, the line between the human and the animal becomes blurred. Beastly Journeys examines these bestial transformations across a range of well-known and less familiar texts and shows how they are provoked not only by the mutations of Darwinism but by social and economic shifts that have been lost in retellings and readings of them. The physical alterations described by George Gissing, George MacDonald, Arthur Machen, Arthur Morrison, W.T. Stead, Bram Stoker, H.G. Wells, Oscar Wilde, and many of their contemporaries, are responses to changes in the social body as Britain underwent a series of social and economic crises. Metaphors of travel DS social, spatial, temporal, mythical and psychological DS keep these stories on the move, confusing literary genres along with the indeterminacy of physical shape that they relate. Beastly Journeys will appeal to anyone interested in the relationship between nineteenth-century literature and its contexts and especially to those interested in the fin de siècle and in metaphors of travel, animals and shape-changing.

Author : Richard Lansdown
Publisher : BRILL
ISBN 13 : 9004356851
Total Pages : 236 pages
Book Rating : 4.56/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Literature and Truth written by Richard Lansdown and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2017-11-01 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Literature and Truth Richard Lansdown examines the relation of literature to truth by tracing the presence of discursive ideas and paradigms in imaginative works.

Author : Charlotte Sleigh
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1137268115
Total Pages : 224 pages
Book Rating : 4.12/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Literature and Science written by Charlotte Sleigh and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2017-09-16 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The growing field of literature and science is for the first time given a fully theorized overview. Using case studies from a three hundred year history, Sleigh focuses on literary form and argues that novels did not just reflect or inform areas of science, but were part of a broader, ongoing cultural negotiation about how to read things.

Author : Barbara Brodman
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN 13 : 161147583X
Total Pages : 277 pages
Book Rating : 4.38/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Images of the Modern Vampire written by Barbara Brodman and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2013-10-04 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the predecessor to this book, The Universal Vampire: Origins and Evolution of a Legend, Brodman and Doan presented discussions of the development of the vampire in the West from the early Norse draugr figure to the medieval European revenant and ultimately to Dracula, who first appears as a vampire in Anglo-Irish Bram Stoker’s novel, Dracula, published in 1897. The essays in that collection also looked at the non-Western vampire in Native American and Mesoamerican traditions, Asian and Russian vampires in popular culture, and the vampire in contemporary novels, film and television. The essays in this collection continue that multi-cultural and multigeneric discussion by tracing the development of the post-modern vampire, in films ranging from Shadow of a Doubt to Blade, The Wisdom of Crocodiles and Interview with the Vampire; the male and female vampires in the Twilight films, Sookie Stackhouse novels and TrueBlood television series; the vampire in African American women’s fiction, Anne Rice’s novels and in the post-apocalyptic I Am Legend; vampires in Japanese anime; and finally, to bring the volumes full circle, the presentation of a new Irish Dracula play, adapted from the novel and set in 1888.

Author : Bernard V. Lightman
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1139992309
Total Pages : 347 pages
Book Rating : 4.05/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Evolution and Victorian Culture written by Bernard V. Lightman and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2014-05-29 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this collection of essays from leading scholars, the dynamic interplay between evolution and Victorian culture is explored for the first time, mapping new relationships between the arts and sciences. Rather than focusing simply on evolution and literature or art, this volume brings together essays exploring the impact of evolutionary ideas on a wide range of cultural activities including painting, sculpture, dance, music, fiction, poetry, cinema, architecture, theatre, photography, museums, exhibitions and popular culture. Broad-ranging, rather than narrowly specialized, each chapter provides a brief introduction to key scholarship, a central section exploring original insights drawn from primary source material, and a conclusion offering overarching principles and a projection towards further areas of research. Each chapter covers the work of significant individuals and groups applying evolutionary theory to their particular art, both as theorists and practitioners. This comprehensive examination of topics sheds light on larger and previously unknown Victorian cultural patterns.