Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species

David Amigoni, Jeff Wallace

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2024
• ISBN:
  9781526184184
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Essays
• Index: Literature

This volume marks a new approach to a seminal work of the modern scientific imagination: Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species (1859). Darwin's central theory of natural selection neither originated nor could be contained, with the parameters of the natural sciences, but continues to shape and challenge our most basic assumptions about human social and political life.Several new readings, crossing the fields of history, literature, sociology, anthropology and history of science, demonstrate the complex position of the text within cultural debates past and present. Contributors examine the reception and rhetoric of the Origin and its influence on systems of classification, the nineteenth-century women's movement, literary culture (criticism and practice) and Hinduism in India. At the same time, a re-reading of Darwin and Malthus offers a constructive critique of our attempts to map the hybrid origins and influences of the text.This volume will be the ideal companion to Darwin's work for all students of literature, social and cultural history and history of science.

Table of contents

• Front matter
• Contents
• Series introduction
• A note on the text
• Chronology
• 1 Introduction: difficulty and defamiliarisation-language and process in The Origin of Species
• 2 Classification and continuity in The Origin of Species
• 3 Science, ideology and culture: Malthus and The Origin of Species
• 4 The Origin of Species and the science of female inferiority
• 5 Proliferation and its discontents: Max Muller, Leslie Stephen, George Eliot and The Origin of Species as representation
• 6 Origins, species and Great Expectations
• 7 Hinduism, Darwinism and evolution in late-nineteenth century India
• Select bibliography
• Notes on contributors
• Index