English 233 (Abbott)
Studies in Nineteenth Century Literature: Darwin and the Fiction of the Later 19th century
Winter 2006
Wednesday, 11:00-1:30 in South Hall 2635

Course description:

This is a course on the impact of Darwin's version of evolutionary theory on the fiction of the later nineteenth century. The impact of Darwin was felt in every sphere of Victorian thought, raising fundamental questions about who we are, how special we are, why we "do good," why we fall in love, what freedom we have, what cosmological narrative (if any) we inhabit, and what control we have over our lives and the course of history. The course starts out with selections from Darwin's Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871) taken from the Norton Critical Edition of Darwin (3rd edition), edited by Philip Appleman. We then move straight to one of the earlier novels to be directly influenced by Darwin (and also one of the early works of science fiction), Bulwer-Lytton's The Coming Race (1871). The course ends with science fiction, too: H. G. Wells's The Time Machine (1895). These two works are the two that deal most directly with issues specifically of evolution, including its mechanics. In between these two bookends, we will be dealing in depth with several major late-nineteenth-century novels, each of which were written, if not in direct response to Darwin, at least under his shadow. Selections at this writing are Thomas Hardy's The Woodlanders (1887), Émile Zola's La bête humaine (1890), Frank Norris’s McTeague (1899), and Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth (1905). My labor/grading parameters are discussion, presentations, and a long essay. There will also be a short get-acquainted essay early in the quarter.

Working syllabus:

January 11: Introduction

January 18: Charles Darwin, selections from The Origin of Species & The Descent of Man (Norton)

January 25: Edward Bulwar Lord Lytton, The Coming Race (Broadview)

February 1: Thomas Hardy, The Woodlanders (Penguin)

February 8: Émile Zola, La bête humaine (Oxford)

February 15: Frank Norris, McTeague (Oxford)

February 22: Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth (Oxford)

March 1: H. G. Wells, The Time Machine (Broadview)

March 8: General discussion

March 13: Class presentations of work in progress

The work for this course is reading the above books, participation in discussion, presentation on one of the novels, presentation of work in progress in the final meeting, and writing.

The difference between the work required of students taking the course for a grade and those taking the course S/U is that the former write two papers, a 4-page paper due February 3 and a 10-20 page paper due March 22. The latter are responsible only for the short paper, and they can hand it in on March 22.

Incompletes are only given in cases of extreme duress.

Further notes:

The edition of Appleman's Darwin that we will be using is the third. The second edition came out 25 years ago (1979), and Appleman has put into the third a rich selection of material from the 1990s. There is some excellent background material here, though, curiously, the weakest section is the literary part (the last).

Darwin & Victorian fiction, related reading:

The two most commonly referenced studies of the interchanging impacts of Darwin and nineteenth-century English fiction are Gillian Beer's Darwin's Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, & Nineteenth-Century Fiction (London, 1983) and George Levine's Darwin and the Novelists: Patterns of Science in Victorian Fiction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988). If there is sufficient demand, I will put these two books on reserve. Beer produced a second edition of her study in 2000 (Cambridge UP) and in the interval published Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996), which includes a significant follow-up to Darwin's Plots titled "Darwinian Encounters." Among George Levine's follow-up studies, one especially worth looking at is "By Knowledge Possessed: Darwin, Nature, and Victorian Narrative" (New Literary History. 24:2 1993 Spring: 363-91). An intriguing study of the ways in which the "hero story" (the Proppian category) has been applied to theories of evolution is Misia Landau's Narratives of Human Evolution (Yale: 1991). Two powerfully researched studies of the nineteenth-century background are Robert J. Richards' Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior (U Chicago P: 1987) and Adrian Desmond's The Politics of Evolution (Chicago: 1989). Richards focuses broadly on how theories of evolution inflected thinking about ethics and ethical behavior from its late-18th-century origins to the present, though the main focus is on nineteenth-century thought. Desmond's is a more tendentious study and more tightly focused on nineteenth-century Darwinian precursors among doctors and radical thinkers. Here are some other helpful background studies:

Barbour, Jan. Myths, Models and Paradigms: The Nature of Scientific and Religious Language. New York: Harper and Row, 1976.

Beach, Joseph Warren. The Concept of Nature in Nineteenth-Century English Poetry, New York, 1936. [A classic early study]

Caldwell, Janis McLarren. Literature and Medicine in Nineteenth-Century Britain, Cambridge: 2004. [This is our own Janis Caldwell. See especially her chapter on Darwin's autobiography]

Chapple, J. A. V. Science & Literature in the Nineteenth Century. London: Macmillan, 1986. [A fine, compact introduction to its titular subject. Includes excellent summary chapters on racial theory and early versions of evolutionary psychology]

Cuddy, Lois A. and Claire M. Roche, eds. Evolution and Eugenics in American Literature and Culture, 1880-1940. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP, 2003.

Culler, A. Dwight. "The Darwinian Revolution and Literary Form," in The Art of Victorian Prose, ed. George Levine. New York: Oxford University Press, 1968. [Classic text]

Dale, Peter Allen. In Pursuit of a Scientific Culture: Science, Art, and Society in the Victorian Age. Madison: U. of Wisconsin P, 1989.

Ebbatson, Roger. The Evolutionary Self: Hardy, Forster, Lawrence. Sussex: Harvester Press, 1982.

Gould, Stephen Jay. The Mismeasure of Man. New York: Norton, 1996. [This is especially relevant in its treatment of the "science" of race in the later nineteenth century]

Henkin, Leo Justin. Darwinism in the English Novel, 1860-1910: The Impact of Evolution on Victorian Fiction. New York: Russell & Russell, 1940. [One of the earliest studies. Especially interesting in treatment of minor works]

Hyman, Stanley Edgar. The Tangled Bank: Darwin, Marx, Frazier & Freud as Imaginative Writers. New York, 1962. [Another classic text]

Knapper, B.G. "The Coming Race: Hell? or Paradise Foretasted?" in Rabkin, Eric S., Greenberg & Olander, eds. No Place Else: Explorations in Utopian and Dystopian Fiction. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP; 1983. pp. 11-32 [The Coming Race, Shaw, evolution, politics, technology, the utopian novel]

Kohn, David, ed. The Darwinian Heritage. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1986.

Morton, Peter. The Vital Science: Biology & the Literary Imagination: 1860-1900. London: Allen & Unwin, 1984. [Can be gratingly opinionated, but provocative, with interesting details on subjects like eugenics]

Nisbet, Robert "Genealogy, Growth, and Other Metaphors" New Literary History 1 (1970): 315-63.

Otis, Laura. Organic Memory: History and the Body in the Late Nineteenth & Early Twentieth Centuries. Lincoln, NB: U of Nebraska P, 1994. [A little off-topic, but includes fascinating material on theories of heredity, including Darwin's, and how they turn up in ideas like racial memory -- especially in Zola]

Peckham, Morse. "Darwinism and Darwinisticism." Victorian Studies 3 (September 1959): 3-40. [Another landmark essay by a still neglected scholar of considerable acumen]

Rylance, Rick. Victorian Psychology & British Culture: 1850-1880. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000. [Includes a good chapter on Herbert Spencer & the early development of evolutionary psychology]

Siegel, Sandra. Literature and Degeneration: The Representation of "Decadence" 199-219, in Chamberlin, J. Edward (ed.) Gilman, Sander L. (ed.) Degeneration: The Dark Side of Progress. New York: Columbia UP; 1985. [The Descent of Man, Frazier's The Golden Bough, decadence, decline, male-female relations]

Yaezell, Ruth Bernard. Sex, Politics, and Science in the Nineteenth-Century Novel. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1986.

Young, Robert M. Darwin's Metaphor: Nature's Place in Victorian Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985. [Treats the metaphor embedded in the phrase "natural selection" as a reflection of Darwin's own embeddedness in his time and culture]

A few readable books on the current state of evolutionary theory:

Dawkins, Richard. Climbing Mount Improbable. New York: Norton, 1996.

Dennett, Daniel C. Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995.

Forey, Richard. Life: an Unauthorized Biography. New York: Knopf, 1998.

Jones, Steve. Darwin's Ghost: The Origin of Species Updated. New York: Random House, 2000.

Mayr, Ernst. What Evolution Is. New York: Basic Books, 2001.