America's Darwin
Darwinian Theory and U.S. Literary Culture
Title Details
Pages: 400
Illustrations: 2 b&w photos, 4 figures
Trim size: 6.000in x 9.000in
Formats
Paperback
Pub Date: 06/15/2014
ISBN: 9-780-8203-4675-5
List Price: $36.95
Web PDF
Pub Date: 06/26/2014
ISBN: 9-780-8203-4690-8
List Price: $36.95
Hardcover
Pub Date: 06/15/2014
ISBN: 9-780-8203-4448-5
List Price: $120.95
America's Darwin
Darwinian Theory and U.S. Literary Culture
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- Description
- Reviews
- Contributors
While much has been written about the impact of Darwin’s theories on U.S. culture, and countless scholarly collections have been devoted to the science of evolution, few have addressed the specific details of Darwin’s theories as a cultural force affecting U.S. writers. America’s Darwin fills this gap and features a range of critical approaches that examine U.S. textual responses to Darwin’s works.
The scholars in this collection represent a range of disciplines—literature, history of science, women’s studies, geology, biology, entomology, and anthropology. All pay close attention to the specific forms that Darwinian evolution took in the United States, engaging not only with Darwin’s most famous works, such as On the Origin of Species, but also with less familiar works, such as The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals.
Each contributor considers distinctive social, cultural, and intellectual conditions that affected the reception and dissemination of evolutionary thought, from before the publication of On the Origin of Species to the early years of the twenty-first century. These essays engage with the specific details and language of a wide selection of Darwin’s texts, treating his writings as primary sources essential to comprehending the impact of Darwinian language on American writers and thinkers. This careful engagement with the texts of evolution enables us to see the broad points of its acceptance and adoption in the American scene; this approach also highlights the ways in which writers, reformers, and others reconfigured Darwinian language to suit their individual purposes.
America’s Darwin demonstrates the many ways in which writers and others fit themselves to a narrative of evolution whose dominant motifs are contingency and uncertainty. Collectively, the authors make the compelling case that the interpretation of evolutionary theory in the U.S. has always shifted in relation to prevailing cultural anxieties.
—Laura Dassow Walls, author of The Passage to Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Shaping of America
—Christoph Irmscher, Reports of the National Center for Science Education
—Mary E. Kohler, American Studies
Tina Gianquitto
Paul Ohler
Kimberly Hamlin
Lydia Fisher
Gillian Feeley-Harnik
Carol Anelli
Jeff Walker
Nicole Merola
Gregory Eiselein
Melanie Dawson
Lilian Carswell
Karen Lentz Madison
R.D. Madison
Prof. Dr. Virginia Richter
Heike Schaefer