ENGL 4425 - [Victorian Evolutions]

(crosslisted) BSOC 4425
(HB) (ALC-AS, LA-AS)

Fall or Spring. Not offered: 2022-2023. Next offered: 2024-2025. 4 credits. Student option grading.

E. Cohn.

In the nineteenth century, evolution was a “dangerous” yet seductive concept. How did competing ideas of evolution impact the literary imagination? This course examines the influence of evolutionary thinking on nineteenth-century literature. Examining Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species and The Descent of Man, we will consider how a galvanizing scientific theory took narrative shape before turning to the work of major Victorian novelists and poets. We will analyze how evolutionary ideas affected how the Victorians understood relations with animals, the status of religion, and the concept of race. In turn, these ideas affected how literary forms and genres themselves (realism, nonsense, elegy, science fiction) “adapted” to evolution’s new horizons on the human. Authors will include Tennyson, Eliot, Carroll, Hardy, Hopkins, Schreiner, and Wells.