Human Forms (eBook)

The Novel in the Age of Evolution

Ian Duncan (Autor)

eBook Download: PDF | EPUB

2019
304 Seiten
Princeton University Press (Verlag)
978-0-691-19418-9 (ISBN)

Infos

A major rethinking of the European novel and its relationship to early evolutionary scienceThe 120 years between Henry Fielding's Tom Jones (1749) and George Eliot's Middlemarch (1871) marked both the rise of the novel and the shift from the presumption of a stable, universal human nature to one that changes over time. In Human Forms, Ian Duncan reorients our understanding of the novel's formation during its cultural ascendancy, arguing that fiction produced new knowledge in a period characterized by the interplay between literary and scientific discourses-even as the two were separating into distinct domains.Duncan focuses on several crisis points: the contentious formation of a natural history of the human species in the late Enlightenment; the emergence of new genres such as the Romantic bildungsroman; historical novels by Walter Scott and Victor Hugo that confronted the dissolution of the idea of a fixed human nature; Charles Dickens's transformist aesthetic and its challenge to Victorian realism; and George Eliot's reckoning with the nineteenth-century revolutions in the human and natural sciences. Modeling the modern scientific conception of a developmental human nature, the novel became a major experimental instrument for managing the new set of divisions-between nature and history, individual and species, human and biological life-that replaced the ancient schism between animal body and immortal soul.The first book to explore the interaction of European fiction with "e;the natural history of man"e; from the late Enlightenment through the mid-Victorian era, Human Forms sets a new standard for work on natural history and the novel.

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 3.9.2019
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Essays / Feuilleton
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Anglistik / Amerikanistik
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturgeschichte
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturwissenschaft
• Themenwelt: Naturwissenschaften
• Schlagworte: Adam Ferguson • Allegory • Allusion • Analogy • anatomy • Anthropocentrism • Anthropomorphism • Antinomy • A Treatise of Human Nature • Bildung • Bildungsroman • Biology • Career • Charles Darwin • Charles Dickens • Charles Lyell • Conjectural history • Consciousness • Criticism • critique • Daniel Deronda • David Hume • development theory • Dialectic • Embryology • Emergence • English novel • evocation • Evolutionism • Explanation • Feuilleton • Fiction • Font Bureau • Franco Moretti • Fredric Jameson • Genre • George Eliot • Henri Bergson • Herbert Spencer • Herder • historical fiction • Historical Romance • Historicism • homo duplex • hypothesis • Immanence • Irony • Jane Austen • Johann Friedrich Blumenbach • lamarckism • Lecture • Literary Realism • Literature • Mary Shelley • Metaphor • Metonymy • Mimesis • Modernity • Nancy Armstrong • Narration • narrative • Natural Philosophy • Novel • novelist • On the Origin of Species • Pathos • Paul de Man • phenomenon • Philosopher • Philosophical Anthropology • Philosophy • Philosophy of Biology • P. J. Conkwright • Poetry • Principles of Geology • Prose • rhetoric • Romanticism • Science • Science Fiction • Science of Man • Scientific Method • Scientific Revolution • Scientist • Scottish Enlightenment • Seminar • sensibility • State of nature • Teratology • the ascent of man • The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex • theory • Theory of Forms • The Realist • Thought • treatise • Typeface • Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation • Vitruvian Man • Writing
• ISBN-10: 0-691-19418-1 / 0691194181
• ISBN-13: 978-0-691-19418-9 / 9780691194189