1st Edition
The Vital Science (Routledge Revivals) Biology and the Literary Imagination,1860-1900
By Peter Morton
Copyright 1984
272 Pages
by
Routledge
272 Pages
by
Routledge
272 Pages
by
Routledge
Also available as eBook on:
In this title, first published in 1984, Peter Morton argues that in late Victorian Britain a group of novelists and essayists quite consciously sought and found ideas in post-Darwinian biology that were susceptible to imaginative transformation. The period between 1860 and 1900 was a time of great confusion in biology; the natural selection hypothesis was in retreat before its acute critics, and... Read more
Acknowledgements; Introduction: Definitions and Perspectives; 1. Darwinism on the Deathbed, 1870-1900: The Failings of Natural Selection 2. Victorian Biology and Victorian Letters: An Overview 3. Better, Wiser, and More Beautiful Beings: The Cheerful Doctrine of Evolutionism 4. Laying the Ghost of the Brute: The Fear of Degeneration 5. Remember, Beethoven’s Father was a Drunkard: The Dubious Appeal of Eugenics 6. Nemesis without Her Mask: Heredity before Mendel 7. This Body Is an Omnibus: The Motif of Heredity in The Way of All Flesh and Tess of the d’Urbervilles; Conclusion; Bibliography; Index
Biography
Peter Morton
