| Author |
Page, Michael R. |
| Year |
2012 |
| Publisher |
Farnham: Ashgate |
| Number of pages |
224 |
| ISBN |
9781409438694 |
| Keywords |
|
Abstract
Amazon (2013):
At the close of the eighteenth century, Erasmus Darwin declared that he would 'enlist
the imagination under the banner of science', beginning, Michael Page argues, a literary
narrative on questions of evolution, ecology, and technological progress that would
extend from the Romantic through the Victorian periods. Examining the interchange
between emerging scientific ideas - specifically evolution and ecology - new technologies,
and literature in nineteenth-century Britain, Page shows how British writers from
Darwin to H.G. Wells confronted the burgeoning expansion of scientific knowledge that
was radically redefining human understanding and experience of the natural world,
of human species, and of the self. The wide range of authors covered in Page's ambitious
study permits him to explore an impressive array of topics that include the role of
the Romantic era in the molding of scientific and cultural perspectives; the engagement
of William Wordsworth and Percy Shelley with questions raised by contemporary science;
Mary Shelley's conflicted views on the unfolding prospects of modernity; and, how
Victorian writers like Charles Kingsley, Samuel Butler, and W.H. Hudson responded
to the implications of evolutionary theory. Page concludes with the scientific romances
of H.G. Wells, to demonstrate how evolutionary fantasies reached the pinnacle of synthesis
between evolutionary science and the imagination at the close of the century.
