Darwin in Atlantic Cultures : Evolutionary Visions of Race, Gender, and Sexuality

by Jones, Jeannette Eileen; Sharp, Patrick B.

• ISBN13: 9780203863336
• ISBN10: 020386333X
• Copyright: 2009-11-16
• Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Summary

This collection is an interdisciplinary edited volume that examines the circulation of Darwinian ideas in the Atlantic space as they impacted systems of Western thought and culture. Specifically, the book explores the influence of the principle tenets of Darwinism -- such as the theory of evolution, the ape-man theory of human origins, and the principle of sexual selection -- on established transatlantic intellectual traditions and cultural practices. In doing so, it pays particular attention to how Darwinism reconfigured discourses on race, gender, and sexuality in a transnational context. Covering the period from the publication of The Origin of Species (1859) to 1933, when the Nazis (National Socialist Party) took power in Germany, the essays demonstrate the dissemination of Darwinian thought in the Western world in an unprecedented commerce of ideas not seen since the Protestant Reformation. Learned societies, literary groups, lyceums, and churches among other sites for public discourse sponsored lectures on the implications of Darwin s theory of evolution for understanding the very ontological codes by which individuals ordered and made sense of their lives. Collectively, these gatherings reflected and constituted what the contributing scholars to this volume view as the discursive power of the cultural politics of Darwinism.

Table of Contents

List of Figures

Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Descent of Darwin in Atlantic Cultures

Genders and Sexualities

Strange Birds: Friedrich Nietzsche, Djuna Barnes, and Queer Evolution

'Sexual Selection' and the Social Revolution: Anarchist Eugenics and Radical Darwinism in the United States, 1850-1910

The Birds and the Bees: Darwin's Evolutionary Approach to Sexuality

Love in the Age of Darwinian Reproduction

Victorian Birdsongs: Sexual Selection, Gender, and Darwin's Theory of Music

Race and Difference

Rise and Fall: Degeneration, Historical Determinism, and William Faulkner's Absalom! Absalom!

What Is It? Difference, Darwin, and the Victorian Freak Show

The Mocking Meme: Popular Darwinism, Illustrative Graphics, and Editorial Cartooning

Selective Affinities: Darwin's Theory of Evolution in Adventure Novels

Colonization, Nation, and "Progress"

Simians, Negroes, and 'Missing Link': Evolutionary Discourses and Transatlantic Debates on 'The Negro Question,'

Evolution in the Backlands: Brazilian Intellectuals and the Development of a Nation

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