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Genetics and the Literary Imagination (Paperback)
Loot Price: R948
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Genetics and the Literary Imagination (Paperback)
Series: Oxford Textual Perspectives
Expected to ship within 10 - 15 working days
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Oxford Textual Perspectives is a series of informative and
provocative studies focused upon literary texts (conceived of in
the broadest sense of that term) and the technologies, cultures,
and communities that produce, inform, and receive them. It provides
fresh interpretations of fundamental works and of the vital and
challenging issues emerging in English literary studies. By
engaging with the materiality of the literary text, its production,
and reception history, and frequently testing and exploring the
boundaries of the notion of text itself, the volumes in the series
question familiar frameworks and provide innovative interpretations
of both canonical and less well-known works. This is the first book
to explore the dramatic impact of genetics on literary fiction over
the past four decades. After James Watson and Francis Crick's
discovery of the structure of DNA in 1953 and the subsequent
cracking of the genetic code, a gene-centric discourse developed
which had a major impact not only on biological science but on
wider culture. As figures like E. O. Wilson and Richard Dawkins
popularised the neo-Darwinian view that behaviour was driven by
genetic self-interest, novelists were both compelled and unnerved
by such a vision of the origins and ends of life. This book maps
the ways in which Doris Lessing, A.S. Byatt, Ian McEwan, and Kazuo
Ishiguro wrestled with the reductionist neo-Darwinian account of
human nature and with the challenge it posed to humanist beliefs
about identity, agency, and morality. It argues that these
novelists were alienated to varying degrees by neo-Darwinian
arguments but that the recent shift to postgenomic science has
enabled a greater rapprochement between biological and
(post)humanist concepts of human nature. The postgenomic view of
organisms as agentic and interactive is echoed in the life-writing
of Margaret Drabble and Jackie Kay, which also explores the ethical
implications of this holistic biological perspective. As advances
in postgenomics, especially epigenetics, provoke increasing public
interest and concern, this book offers a timely analysis of debates
that have fundamentally altered our understanding of what it means
to be human.
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