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.
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