Marking Time: Romanticism and Evolution - Hardcover

9781442644304: Marking Time: Romanticism and Evolution

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1442644303 ISBN 13: 9781442644304

Publisher: University of Toronto Press, 2017

Scholars have long studied the impact of Charles Darwin’s writings on nineteenth-century culture. However, few have ventured to examine the precursors to the ideas of Darwin and others in the Romantic period.

Marking Time, edited by Joel Faflak, analyses prevailing notions of evolution by tracing its origins to the literary, scientific, and philosophical discourses of the long nineteenth century. The volume’s contributors revisit key developments in the history of evolution prior to The Origin of Species and explore British and European Romanticism’s negotiation between the classic idea of a great immutable chain of being and modern notions of historical change. Marking Time reveals how Romantic and post-Romantic configurations of historical, socio-cultural, scientific, and philosophical transformation continue to exert a profound influence on critical and cultural thought.

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About the Author:

Joel Faflak is Professor in the Department of English and Writing Studies and Director of the School for Advanced Studies in the Arts and Humanities at Western University.

Review:

"The importance of pre-Darwinian theorists of evolution is receiving more critical attention. Revealing how notions of evolution were very current and contested in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Marking Time illustrates how Romantic concerns with organicism, vitalism and natural history fed into contemporary understandings of natural development. Marking Time is a very impressive contribution to the currently vibrant subject of science and Romanticism, and highlights the work of leading scholars in the field."

(Peter J. Kitson, professor of English Literature, University of East Anglia)

"Containing superb, thought-provoking essays, Marking Time raises new questions about Darwin and the precursors and consequences of his thought."

(Tim Fulford, professor of English, De Montfort University, Leicester, UK)

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