Darwin and the Novelists: Patterns of Science in Victorian FictionLevine shows how Darwin's ideas affected nineteenth-century novelists—from Dickens and Trollope to Conrad. "Levine stands in our day as the premier critic and commentator on Victorian prose."—Frank M. Turner, Nineteenth-Century Literature. "Magnificently written, with a care and delicacy worthy of its subject."—Nina Auerbach, University of Pennsylvania |
Contents
1 Darwin amond the Novelists | 1 |
Whewell and Darwin | 24 |
Observation Rewarded | 56 |
From Natural Theology to Natural Selecion | 84 |
5 Dickens and Darwin | 119 |
6 Little Dorrit and Three Kinds of Science | 153 |
Other editions - View all
Darwin and the Novelists: Patterns of Science in Victorian Fiction George Levine Limited preview - 1991 |
Common terms and phrases
adaptation affirm animals Anthony Trollope argues argument assumptions Austen's Autobiography becomes biology Bleak House chance characters Charles Darwin Charles Dickens Clennam complex condition Conrad consequence conventions culture Darwin Darwin's theory Darwinian deny Dickens Dickens's disruptive divine domestic entails essay experience explanation fact Fanny Fanny's fiction force G. H. Lewes George Eliot Herschel human idea ideal imagination implicit implies individual inevitable Jane Austen kind knowledge language laws Little Dorrit Mansfield Park meaning metaphor Middlemarch moral narrative narrator natural selection natural theology natural-theological naturalistic nineteenth-century novel novelists numbers observation organisms Origin Paley particular physical plot political possible protagonists Razumov realist reality relation resistance revolution revolutionary rhetoric says scientific scientists secular seems self-consciously sense social society species story strategies structure suggest T. H. Huxley teleology Thackeray thermodynamics things thought tradition Trollope Trollope's ultimately uniformitarian University Press variations Victorian vision Whewell Whewell's writing