Browsing by Subject "Darwin"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Aliens and Animals: Notes on Literary Lifeforms After Darwin and Freud
    (2019-12) Rowe, Michael
    This dissertation examines the work of early twentieth-century English and American writers publishing in the aftermath of war, rapid modernization, and newly urgent questions of social control and management. More specifically, it looks at writers whose work was inflected by a reading of Charles Darwin and/or Sigmund Freud. The writings of Darwin and Freud created new possibilities for reconsidering the relationship of human beings and nonhuman animals. Closely attending to the “presence” of nonhuman figures in the works of Jack London, D.H. Lawrence, H.P. Lovecraft, and Djuna Barnes, this dissertation argues that each writer, with the exception of Barnes, presumes there is a way, via the figure of the animal, to escape or see outside human culture. In the case of Jack London’s John Barleycorn, his memoir on drinking that is also an extended argument for sobriety and Prohibition, London’s image of a draft horse ultimately indicates the impossibility of any kind of sobriety. In London’s imagination, each individual subject is governed by an object—language, imagination, or legal authority—that they ingest to become what they are or could be. D.H. Lawrence’s novella, St. Mawr, likewise uses the figure of a horse, though his stallion suggests that the inexplicability of instinctual animal life—the impossibility of knowing an animal’s interior states of feeling and being—shows a way forward for human beings caught up in the melodrama of “personality.” In the end, Lawrence reaffirms masculine power and the subjugation of women. While H.P. Lovecraft’s short story, “The Whisperer in Darkness” indicates that nonhuman presence can make itself known by failing to “show up,” so to speak, in representational language, his tale recapitulates a fantasy of imperial dominion. His aliens turn out to be human after all. Djuna Barnes’s story, “A Night Among the Horses,” tells a different tale, one in which there is no getting outside human culture. The worlds depicted in London, Lawrence, and Lovecraft accept a binary of “nonhuman” nature and human culture that Barnes throws into question. If the figure of the animal provides an escape hatch, Barnes shows that the hatch leads back inside.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Darwin, Huxley, and the Nineteenth-Century Rhetoric of Science
    (2016-09) Wright, Jeffrey
    The interactions between Charles Darwin and Thomas Henry Huxley are widely misunderstood. Huxley neither rejected Darwin’s core ideas nor accepted them uncritically; instead, each scientist strongly influenced the other over a period of several decades. Fully understanding their debate requires understanding the rhetoric of the time, which leads to a realization that nineteenth-century scientists were familiar with a rhetoric of science that addresses many of the same issues that the discipline does today. The rhetorician Benjamin Humphrey Smart, although almost forgotten today, was highly influential not only on Darwin, but on the physicist Michael Faraday and the philosopher of science John Stuart Mill. His ideas set much of the background for the debate.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Entangled Influence: Wordsworth and Darwinism in the Late Victorian Period
    (2014-07) Olsen, Trenton B.
    This dissertation examines the intersection of William Wordsworth's influence and evolutionary theory---the nineteenth century's two defining representations of nature---in late Victorian literature and society. Victorian writers were sensitive to the compatibilities and conflicts between these philosophies, and Wordsworth's poetry was enlisted in arguments both for and against evolution. Creative writers and critics alike turned to the poet as an alternative or antidote to evolution, criticized and revised his poetry in response to this discourse, and synthesized elements of each to propose their own modified theories. In engaging with Wordsworth's influence in this way, these writers began to see literary influence and history in Darwinian terms. They viewed their engagement with Wordsworth and Darwin, which was both competitive and collaborative, as a struggle for literary survival and offspring as well as transformative encounters in their development. This model of "literary selection" synthesizes opposing influence theories, and differs from objectivist accounts of Darwinian cultural transmission through its emphasis on writers' subjectivities, idiosyncratic language, and conscious adoption and modification of evolutionary ideas in their literary relationships. The opening chapter surveys a broad range of critical and creative writing to demonstrate the prevalence of Wordsworth's and Darwin's intertwining influences in the period, and outlines the various ideological positions late Victorian writers occupied toward these entangled philosophies. The chapter explores these simultaneous influences in the work of Thomas Hardy, George Meredith, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Charles Kingsley, and Emily Pfieffer along with a host of Victorian critics. The three central chapters provide in-depth demonstrations of this argument in the work of Matthew Arnold, George Eliot, and Robert Louis Stevenson, respectively. The final chapter moves beyond literature to read the late nineteenth-century conservation movement, in which The Wordsworth Society helped establish the National Trust to preserve the Lake District's landscape, as a conflict between Wordsworthian and Darwinian ideas.