Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Crawford, Iain

Titel

Human Forms: The Novel in the Age of Evolution by Ian Duncan (review)

Ist Teil von

• Dickens Quarterly, 2020-06, Vol.37 (2), p.204-208

Ort / Verlag

Oxford: Johns Hopkins University Press

Erscheinungsjahr

2020

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Literature Online (LION eBooks)

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• The "key development," he argues, was "Herder's figurative mobilization of concepts emerging from the new life sciences for a naturalization of the history of man," since this would allow not only for cultural anthropology to emerge as a discipline but also for "the full immersion of the human in a natural history of infinite formal variability" (40). Bleak House gives us a world of "transformist natural history" (127), its character system mapping "a saltationist, catastrophic transformism unregulated … by a progressive teleology, in which mutations are as likely (or likelier) to be retrogressions, or grotesque lateral formations, as upwards steps" (137–38). Dickens's natural history, that is, looks back to Lamarck and Geoffroy and, mediated through the enormously popular rendering Robert Chambers provided through his Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, places greater emphasis upon the role of environmental factors in shaping organic development and less on the part played by natural selection that Darwin would privilege. [...]Duncan shows how the topos of the visionary or lyric prospect adopted by British fiction during the Romantic period is adapted further by Dickens as, by using it to mark the limitations of Esther's insight into the world, he indicates "a general derangement of realist narrative's tropism towards omniscience, the command of a fully humanized world" (151).