| Author |
Levine, George Lewis |
| Year |
2011 |
| Publisher |
Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press |
| Number of pages |
272 |
| ISBN |
97801996084300199 |
| Keywords |
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Abstract
Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, arguably the most important book written
in English in the nineteenth century, transformed the way we looked at the world.
It is usually assumed that this is because the idea of evolution was so staggeringly
powerful. Prize-winning author George Levine suggests that much of its influence was
due, in fact, to its artistry; to the way it was written. Alive with metaphor, vivid
descriptions, twists, hesitations, personal exclamations, and humour, the prose is
imbued with the sorts of tensions, ambivalences, and feelings characteristic of great
literature. Although it is certainly a work of "science," the Origin is equally a
work of "literature," at home in the company of celebrated Victorian novels such as
Middlemarch and Bleak House, books that give us a unique yet recognisable sense of
what the world is really like, while not being literally 'true'. Darwin's enormous
cultural success, Levine contends, depended as much on the construction of his argument
and the nature of his language, as it did on the power of his ideas and his evidence.
By challenging the dominant reading of his work, this impassioned and energetic book
gives us a Darwin who is comic rather than tragic, ebullient rather than austere,
and who takes delight in the wild and fluid entanglement of things.
