Literature after Darwin [Elektronisk resurs] human beasts in western fiction 1859-1939 / Virginia Richter.

• Acknowledgments List of Abbreviations List of Epigraphs What Animal? Darwin's Displacement of Man Creating Connections: Humans, Apes, and Missing Links Apes and Ape-Men: the Anxiety of Simianation Missing Links and Lost Worlds: the Anxiety of Assimilation Cultural Pessimism and Anthropological Anxiety Notes Bibliography Index.

• What makes us human? Where is the limit between human and animal? These are questions that haunt post-Darwinian literature. Covering fiction from Kipling to Kafka, this study offers a historically embedded analysis of anthropological anxiety in the period between the publication of the Origin of Species and the beginning of the Second World War. -- What makes us human? Where is the limit between human and animal? Is the human species the contingent result of blind evolutionary processes? These pressing questions haunt literature in the wake of Darwin's shocking claim that humans and apes are descended from a common ancestor. Anxiety concerning the status of humankind is a central theme in Victorian and modernist fiction, ranging from 'ape narratives' (e.g. the Tarzan series) to fantastic encounters with missing links, primeval men and 'races of the future'. All are pervaded by the spectres of degeneration and dehumanisation as well as by apocalyptic visions of the end of humankind. The exploration of these existential anxieties and their various literary expressions stands at the centre of this study which offers detailed and original analyses of a broad range of literary texts, covering the period between the publication of the Origin of Species and the beginning of the Second World War. 

Ämnesord

Evolution (Biology) in literature.  (LCSH)

Anthropology in literature.  (LCSH)

Human beings in literature.  (LCSH)

Animals in literature.  (LCSH)

Fiction  -- 19th century -- History and criticism. (LCSH)

Fiction  -- 20th century -- History and criticism. (LCSH)

Fiction  -- History and criticism -- 19th century. (LCSH)

Fiction  -- History and criticism -- 20th century. (LCSH)

Literature.  (eflch)

Klassifikation

LIT (ämneskategori)

809.3935 (DDC)