Marking Time Romanticism and Evolution

About this book

Scholars have long studied the impact of Charles Darwin's writings on nineteenth-century culture. However, few have ventured to examine the precursors to the ideas of Darwin and others in the Romantic period.

Marking Time, edited by Joel Faflak, analyses prevailing notions of evolution by tracing its origins to the literary, scientific, and philosophical discourses of the long nineteenth century. The volume's contributors revisit key developments in the history of evolution prior to On the Origin of Species and explore British and European Romanticism's negotiation between the classic idea of a great immutable chain of being and modern notions of historical change. Marking Time reveals how Romantic and post-Romantic configurations of historical, socio-cultural, scientific, and philosophical transformation continue to exert a profound influence on critical and cultural thought.
 

Contents

List of Illustrations

Marking Time: Romanticism and Evolution
      Joel Faflak
Part 1 Romanticism's Darwin
1. Plants, Analogy, and Perfection: Loose and Strict Analogies
      Gillian Beer
2. Darwin and the Mobility of Species
      Alan Bewell
3. Darwin’s Ideas
      Matthew Rowlinson

Part 2 Romantic Temporalities
4. Deep Time in the South Pacific: Scientific Voyaging and the Ancient/Primitive Analogy
      Noah Heringman
5. Malthus Our Contemporary?: Toward a Political Economy of Sex
      Maureen N. McLane

Part 3 Goethe and the Contingencies of Life
6. Goethe's Morphology
      Gábor Áron Zemplén
7. Vertiginous Life: Goethe, Bones, and Italy
      Andrew Piper
8. Taking Chances
      Theresa M. Kelley

Part 4 Evolutionary Idealisms
9. Did Goethe and Schelling Endorse Species Evolution?
      Robert J. Richards
10. The Vitality of Idealism: Life and Evolution in Schelling’s and Hegel’s Systems
      Tilottama Rajan
11. Degeneration: Inversions of Teleology
      Joan Steigerwald

Contributors
Index

Customer Reviews

Biography

Joel Faflak is Professor in the Department of English and Writing Studies and Director of the School for Advanced Studies in the Arts and Humanities at Western University.