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Human Forms - The Novel in the Age of Evolution (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R926
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Human Forms - The Novel in the Age of Evolution (Hardcover)
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A major rethinking of the European novel and its relationship to
early evolutionary science The 120 years between Henry Fielding's
Tom Jones (1749) and George Eliot's Middlemarch (1871) marked both
the rise of the novel and the shift from the presumption of a
stable, universal human nature to one that changes over time. In
Human Forms, Ian Duncan reorients our understanding of the novel's
formation during its cultural ascendancy, arguing that fiction
produced new knowledge in a period characterized by the interplay
between literary and scientific discourses-even as the two were
separating into distinct domains. Duncan focuses on several crisis
points: the contentious formation of a natural history of the human
species in the late Enlightenment; the emergence of new genres such
as the Romantic bildungsroman; historical novels by Walter Scott
and Victor Hugo that confronted the dissolution of the idea of a
fixed human nature; Charles Dickens's transformist aesthetic and
its challenge to Victorian realism; and George Eliot's reckoning
with the nineteenth-century revolutions in the human and natural
sciences. Modeling the modern scientific conception of a
developmental human nature, the novel became a major experimental
instrument for managing the new set of divisions-between nature and
history, individual and species, human and biological life-that
replaced the ancient schism between animal body and immortal soul.
The first book to explore the interaction of European fiction with
"the natural history of man" from the late Enlightenment through
the mid-Victorian era, Human Forms sets a new standard for work on
natural history and the novel.
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