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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.
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
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.
