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Author: George Levine Publisher: University of Chicago Press ISBN: 0226475743 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 334
Book Description
The Victorian novel clearly joins with science in the pervasive secularizing of nature and society and in the exploration of the consequences of secularization that characterized mid-Victorian England. p. viii.
Author: George Levine Publisher: University of Chicago Press ISBN: 0226475743 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 334
Book Description
The Victorian novel clearly joins with science in the pervasive secularizing of nature and society and in the exploration of the consequences of secularization that characterized mid-Victorian England. p. viii.
Author: George Levine Publisher: Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press ISBN: Category : English fiction Languages : en Pages : 344
Book Description
Insisting on gradual and regular--lawful--change, Darwinian thought nevertheless requires acknowledgment of chance and randomness for a full explanation of biological phenomena. Levine shows how these conceptions affected 19th-century novelists--from Dickens and Trollope to Conrad--and draws contrasts with the pre-Darwinian novel.
Author: George Levine Publisher: OUP Oxford ISBN: 0191620629 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 310
Book Description
Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, arguably the most important book written in English in the nineteenth century, transformed the way we looked at the world. It is usually assumed that this is because the idea of evolution was so staggeringly powerful. Prize-winning author George Levine suggests that much of its influence was due, in fact, to its artistry; to the way it was written. Alive with metaphor, vivid descriptions, twists, hesitations, personal exclamations, and humour, the prose is imbued with the sorts of tensions, ambivalences, and feelings characteristic of great literature. Although it is certainly a work of "science," the Origin is equally a work of "literature," at home in the company of celebrated Victorian novels such as Middlemarch and Bleak House, books that give us a unique yet recognisable sense of what the world is really like, while not being literally 'true'. Darwin's enormous cultural success, Levine contends, depended as much on the construction of his argument and the nature of his language, as it did on the power of his ideas and his evidence. By challenging the dominant reading of his work, this impassioned and energetic book gives us a Darwin who is comic rather than tragic, ebullient rather than austere, and who takes delight in the wild and fluid entanglement of things.
Author: Peter W. Graham Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1317111494 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 215
Book Description
Are Jane Austen and Charles Darwin the two great English empiricists of the nineteenth century? Peter W. Graham poses this question as he brings these two icons of nineteenth-century British culture into intellectual conversation in his provocative new book. Graham shows that while the one is generally termed a naturalist (Darwin's preferred term for himself) and the other a novelist, these characterizations are at least partially interchangeable, as each author possessed skills that would serve well in either arena. Both Austen and Darwin are naturalists who look with a sharp, cold eye at the concrete particulars of the world around them. Both are in certain senses novelists who weave densely particularized and convincingly grounded narratives that convey their personal observations and perceptions to wide readerships. When taken seriously, the words and works of Austen and Darwin encourage their readers to look closely at the social and natural worlds around them and form opinions based on individual judgment rather than on transmitted opinion. Graham's four interlocked essays begin by situating Austen and Darwin in the English empirical tradition and focusing on the uncanny similarities in the two writers' respective circumstances and preoccupations. Both Austen and Darwin were fascinated by sibling relations. Both were acute observers and analysts of courtship rituals. Both understood constant change as the way of the world, whether the microcosm under consideration is geological, biological, social, or literary. Both grasped the importance of scale in making observations. Both discerned the connection between minute, particular causes and vast, general effects. Employing the trenchant analytical talents associated with his subjects and informed by a wealth of historical and biographical detail and the best of recent work by historians of science, Graham has given us a new entree into Austen's and Darwin's writings.
Author: Randall Fuller Publisher: Penguin ISBN: 0143130099 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 314
Book Description
A compelling portrait of a unique moment in American history when the ideas of Charles Darwin reshaped American notions about nature, religion, science and race “A lively and informative history.” – The New York Times Book Review Throughout its history America has been torn in two by debates over ideals and beliefs. Randall Fuller takes us back to one of those turning points, in 1860, with the story of the influence of Charles Darwin’s just-published On the Origin of Species on five American intellectuals, including Bronson Alcott, Henry David Thoreau, the child welfare reformer Charles Loring Brace, and the abolitionist Franklin Sanborn. Each of these figures seized on the book’s assertion of a common ancestry for all creatures as a powerful argument against slavery, one that helped provide scientific credibility to the cause of abolition. Darwin’s depiction of constant struggle and endless competition described America on the brink of civil war. But some had difficulty aligning the new theory to their religious convictions and their faith in a higher power. Thoreau, perhaps the most profoundly affected all, absorbed Darwin’s views into his mysterious final work on species migration and the interconnectedness of all living things. Creating a rich tableau of nineteenth-century American intellectual culture, as well as providing a fascinating biography of perhaps the single most important idea of that time, The Book That Changed America is also an account of issues and concerns still with us today, including racism and the enduring conflict between science and religion.
Author: Thomas F. Glick Publisher: JHU Press ISBN: 0801897521 Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 554
Book Description
2010 Outstanding Academic Title, Choice Magazine Charles Darwin and his revolutionary ideas inspired pundits the world over to put pen to paper. In this unique dictionary of quotations, Darwin scholar Thomas Glick presents fascinating observations about Darwin and his ideas from such notable figures as P. T. Barnum, Anton Chekhov, Mahatma Gandhi, Carl Jung, Martin Luther King, Mao Tse-tung, Pius IX, Jules Verne, and Virginia Woolf. What was it about Darwin that generated such widespread interest? His Origin of Species changed the world. Naturalists, clerics, politicians, novelists, poets, musicians, economists, and philosophers alike could not help but engage his theory of evolution. Whatever their view of his theory, however, those who met Darwin were unfailingly charmed by his modesty, kindness, honesty, and seriousness of purpose. This diverse collection drawn from essays, letters, novels, short stories, plays, poetry, speeches, and parodies demonstrates how Darwin’s ideas permeated all areas of thought. The quotations trace a broad conversation about Darwin across great distances of time and space, revealing his profound influence on the great thinkers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Author: Michael Ruse Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0190241020 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 329
Book Description
'Darwinism as Religion' argues that the theory of evolution given by Charles Darwin in the 19th-century has always functioned as much as a secular form of religion as anything purely scientific. Through the words of novelists and poets, Michael Ruse argues that Darwin took us from the secure world of Christian faith into a darker, less friendly world of chance and lack of meaning.
Author: K. Thalia Grant Publisher: Princeton University Press ISBN: 0691142106 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 376
Book Description
Recreates the scientist's historic visit to the Galapagos Islands using his original notebooks and logs, the latest findings by scholars and researchers, and the authors' first-hand knowledge of the archipelago.
Author: Jerry Fodor Publisher: Profile Books ISBN: 1847651909 Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 114
Book Description
Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piatelli-Palmarini, a distinguished philosopher and scientist working in tandem, reveal major flaws at the heart of Darwinian evolutionary theory. They do not deny Darwin's status as an outstanding scientist but question the inferences he drew from his observations. Combining the results of cutting-edge work in experimental biology with crystal-clear philosophical argument they mount a devastating critique of the central tenets of Darwin's account of the origin of species. The logic underlying natural selection is the survival of the fittest under changing environmental pressure. This logic, they argue, is mistaken. They back up the claim with evidence of what actually happens in nature. This is a rare achievement - the short book that is likely to make a great deal of difference to a very large subject. What Darwin Got Wrong will be controversial. The authors' arguments will reverberate through the scientific world. At the very least they will transform the debate about evolution.
Author: George Levine
Author: George Levine
Author: George Levine
Author: George Levine
Author: Peter W. Graham
Author: Emma Darwin
Author: Randall Fuller
Author: Thomas F. Glick
Author: Michael Ruse
Author: K. Thalia Grant
Author: Jerry Fodor