Darwin the writer / by George Levine.
2011
QH365.O8 L49 2011 (Mapit)
Available at General Collection
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Details
Title
Darwin the writer / by George Levine.
Author
Levine, George, 1931-
ISBN
9780199608430 (alk. paper)
0199608431 (alk. paper)
0199608431 (alk. paper)
Imprint
Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press, 2011.
Language
English
Description
xvii, 244 p. : ill. ; 23 cm.
Call Number
QH365.O8 L49 2011
Dewey Decimal Classification
576.82
Summary
Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, arguably the most important book written in English in the nineteenth century, transformed the way we looked at the world. It is usually assumed that this is because the idea of evolution was so staggeringly powerful. Prize-winning author George Levine suggests that much of its influence was due, in fact, to its artistry; to the way it was written. Alive with metaphor, vivid descriptions, twists, hesitations, personal exclamations, and humour, the prose is imbued with the sorts of tensions, ambivalences, and feelings characteristic of great literature. Although it is certainly a work of "science," the Origin is equally a work of "literature," at home in the company of celebrated Victorian novels such as Middlemarch and Bleak House, books that give us a unique yet recognisable sense of what the world is really like, while not being literally 'true'. Darwin's enormous cultural success, Levine contends, depended as much on the construction of his argument and the nature of his language, as it did on the power of his ideas and his evidence. By challenging the dominant reading of his work, this impassioned and energetic book gives us a Darwin who is comic rather than tragic, ebullient rather than austere, and who takes delight in the wild and fluid entanglement of things.
Bibliography, etc. Note
Includes bibliographical references and index.
"Select bibliography on Darwin, his theory, and its extrascientific connections".
"Select bibliography on Darwin, his theory, and its extrascientific connections".
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Table of Contents
Darwin the writer
Learning to see : Darwin's prophetic apprenticeship on the Beagle voyage
The prose of On the origin of species
Surprise and paradox : Darwin's artful legacy
Darwinian mind and Wildean paradox
Hardy's Woodlanders and the Darwinian grotesque
Coda: The comic Darwin.
Learning to see : Darwin's prophetic apprenticeship on the Beagle voyage
The prose of On the origin of species
Surprise and paradox : Darwin's artful legacy
Darwinian mind and Wildean paradox
Hardy's Woodlanders and the Darwinian grotesque
Coda: The comic Darwin.