Essay Review: Darwin and George Eliot: Plotting and Organicism: Darwin's Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin,George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction,George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Science: The Make-Believe of a Beginning
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Essay Review: Darwin and George Eliot: Plotting and Organicism: Darwin's Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin,George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction,George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Science: The Make-Believe of a Beginning
BeerGillian, Darwin's plots: Evolutionary narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and nineteenth-century fiction (London, 1983), 7.
2.
ShuttleworthSally, George Eliot and nineteenth-century science: The make-believe of a beginning (Cambridge, 1984), p. ix.
3.
JordanovaL. J., “Romantic science? Michelet, morals and nature”, The British journal for the history of science, xiii (1980), 44–49, p. 49.
4.
LovejoyArthur O., The great chain of being (Cambridge, Mass., 1936). For a critique of Lovejoy's approach to the history of ideas see BresdorffThomas, “Lovejoy's idea of ‘idea’”, New literary history, viii (1976–77), 195–211.
5.
On texts and textuality see BarthesRoland, “From work to text” in Image-music-text: Essays selected and translated by Stephen Heath (London, 1977), 155–64; RicœurPaul, “What is a text? Explanation and understanding” and “The model of the text: Meaningful action considered as a text”, in ThompsonJohn B. (ed.), Paul Ricœur: Hermeneutics and the human sciences. Essays on language, action and interpretation (Cambridge, 1981), 145–64, 197–221.
6.
HymanStanley Edgar, The tangled bank: Darwin, Marx, Eraser as imaginative writers (New York, 1962). For the limitations of Hyman's book see CullerA. Dwight, “The Darwinian revolution and literary form”, in LevineGeorge and MaddenWilliam (eds), The art of Victorian prose (New York, 1968), 225.
7.
PeckhamMorse, “Darwinism and Darwinisticism”, Victorian studies, iii (1959–60), 21–29.
8.
GibbonsTom, Rooms in the Darwin hotel: Studies in English literary criticism and ideas, 1880–1920 (NedlandsAustraliaW., 1973), pp. ix, 2–4.
9.
BannisterRobert C., Social Darwinism: Science and myth in Anglo-American social thought (Philadelphia, 1979); Greta Jones, Social Darwinism and English thought: The interaction between biological and social theory (Brighton, 1980).
10.
See especially Bannister, Social Darwinism, 9–10, 14–16, 24–29; Jones, Social Darwinism and English thought, 74–75, 221–3, 136–8, 143–7.
11.
DurantJohn R., “The meaning of evolution” (Ph.D. thesis, Cambridge University, 1978), 9, 14n. 27, 271–4.
12.
MooreJames R., The post-Darwinian controversies: A study of the Protestant struggle to come to terms with Darwin in Great Britain and America (Cambridge, 1979), 14–15, 114–15.
13.
PaulHarry W., The edge of contingency: French Catholic reaction to scientific change from Darwin to Duhem (Gainesville, Florida, 1979); KellyAlfred, The descent of Darwin: The popularization of Darwinism in Germany, 1860–1914 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1981).
14.
GlissermanSusan, “Early Victorian science writers and Tennyson's ‘In Memoriam’: A study in cultural exchange”, Victorian studies, xviii (1975), 278–81; YoungRobert M., “The historiographic and ideological contexts of the nineteenth century debate on man's place in nature”, in TeichM. and YoungRobert M. (eds), Changing perspectives in the history of science (London, 1973), 344–438, and “Natural theology, Victorian periodicals and the fragmentation of a common context”, in ChantColin and FauvelJohn (eds), Darwin to Einstein: Historical studies on science and belief (Harlow, 1980), 69–106; ManierEdward, The young Darwin and his cultural circle (Dordrecht and Boston, 1978); GillespieNeal C., Charles Darwin and the problem of creation (Chicago and London, 1979).
15.
Beer, Darwin's plots, 7; BloomHarold, The anxiety of influence: A theory of poetry (New York and London, 1973), and A map of misreading (New York and London, 1975).
16.
Beer, Darwin's plots, 44–45.
17.
DarwinCharles, The origin of species by means of natural selection or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life, Pelican edn, ed. by BurrowJ. W. (Harmondsworth, 1968). 114–15, cited Beer, Darwin's plots, 45.
18.
Beer, Darwin's plots, 46.
19.
ibid., 9, 16.
20.
WhiteHayden, “The fictions of factual representation”, in FletcherA. (ed.), The literature of fact (New York, 1976), 38; cf. Beer, Darwin's plots, 54–55, 271.
21.
Beer, Darwin's plots, 96; YoungRobert M., “Darwin's metaphor: Does nature select?”, The monist, lv (1971), 442–503; GruberHoward D., “The evolving systems approach to creative scientific work: Charles Darwin's early thought”, in NicklesT. (ed.), Scientific discovery: Case histories (Boston and Dordrecht, 1980), 113–30.
Beer, Darwin's plots, 18, 88–89; [ChambersRobert], Vestiges of the natural history of creation (London, 1844), 1.
25.
Beer, Darwin's plots, 97, cf. 55.
26.
ibid., 10.
27.
BarthesRoland, Pleasure of the text (London, 1976), 6, 13–14, 31.
28.
BarthesRoland, Sade, Fourier, Loyola (New York, 1976), 3; cf. Beer, Darwin's plots, 36–37.
29.
Cited Beer, Darwin's plots, 245.
30.
BeerGillian, “Plot and the analogy with science in later nineteenth-century novelists”, Comparative criticism, ii (1980), 131–50.
31.
For formalist theories of plotting see ErlichVictor, Russian formalism: History-doctrine, 2nd rev. edn (The Hague, 1965); JamesonFrederic, The prison-house of language: A critical account of structuralism and Russian formalism (Princeton, 1972).
32.
Beer, Darwin's plots, 51. See also RicœurPaul and TiffenauDorian (eds), La narrativité (Paris, 1983) for narratives and “narrativity”.
33.
Beer, Darwin's plots, 99.
34.
ibid., 107.
35.
ibid., 111.
36.
ibid., 114.
37.
Cf. GibsonWalker, “Behind the veil: A distinction between poetic and scientific language in Tennyson, Lyell and Darwin”, Victorian studies, ii (1958), 60–68; CannonWalter F., “Darwin's vision in On the origin of species”, in Levine and Madden, op. cit. (ref. 6); WilliamsCarolyn, “Natural selection and narrative form in The egoist”, Victorian studies, xxvii (1983–84), 53–79.
38.
Beer, Darwin's plots, 150–1.
39.
ibid., 55.
40.
ibid., 186.
41.
ibid., 221.
42.
Shuttleworth, op. cit. (ref. 2), 176–7.
43.
ibid., p. ix.
44.
RitterbushPhilip C., “Organic form: Aesthetics and objectivity in the study of form in the life sciences”, in RousseauG. S. (ed.), Organic form: The life of an idea (London, 1972), 52.
45.
Shuttleworth, op. cit. (ref. 2), p. ix.
46.
ibid., 200. For Eliot and Lewes see also LevineGeorge, “George Eliot's hypothesis of reality”, Nineteenth-century fiction, xxxv (1980–81), 1–28.
47.
ibid., p. xii.
48.
EagletonTerry, Criticism and ideology: A study in Marxist literary theory (London, 1976), 102–3. Cf. AbramsM. H., The mirror and the lamp (London, 1953); WimsattWilliam K., “Organic form: Some questions about a metaphor”, in Rousseau (ed.), Organic form (ref. 44), 61–81.
49.
Eagleton, Criticism and ideology, 121.
50.
Shuttleworth, op. cit. (ref. 2), p. xiv.
51.
ibid., 188, 199.
52.
MyersWilliam, The leaching of George Eliot (Leicester, 1984), 153, 131.
53.
Young in Chant and Fauvel, Darwin to Einstein (ref. 16), 74–75.
54.
HarrisonFrederic, Autobiographic memoirs (2 vols, London, 1911), ii, 108.