Romanticism on the Net : The Two Darwins
- Submitting institution
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Roehampton University
- Unit of assessment
- 27 - English Language and Literature
- Output identifier
- 4899656
- Type
- B - Edited book
- DOI
-
-
- Publisher
- Romanticism on the net
- ISBN
- 0000-0000-00
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- March
- Year of publication
- 2019
- URL
-
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
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-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This submission comprises the special edition of the journal Romanticism on the Net devoted to ‘The Two Darwins’ that I co-edited with Martin Priestman in 2016, which contains a 7000-word co-authored general introduction (‘Introduction – Evolution and Literature: The Two Darwins’), written mostly by me (with the exception of one paragraph), and my 16,000-word chapter ‘Charles Darwin’s “Scientific Wit”: Incongruity, Species Fixity and the Nonsense of Looking’. These two texts establish new directions for thinking about knowledge-creation in Romantic and Victorian science. Drawing together the themes of seven essays totalling over 75,000 words, written by some of the most distinctive and authoritative international voices currently working on Erasmus and Charles Darwin, the Introduction re-situates the poetic and scientific practice of both thinkers: firstly, through an explication of their engagement with elegiac and ‘counter-elegiac’ poetic discourse; secondly, through a consideration of the effect of their evolutionary ideas on literary form, from epic poetry to the Erasmus-inspired science fiction of the late nineteenth century; and finally, through a reappraisal of debates about scientific objectivity, both at home and abroad. My article on Charles’s humour falls in the final tranche of the edition, and here, I establish an alternative, experiential account of his fieldwork during the voyage of the Beagle, deploying a key figure of nineteenth-century philosophical thinking: incongruity. By radically revisioning the approach of Victorian science’s most iconic exponent, my essay intervenes in historical and ongoing debates about scientific creativity and attention-creation, whilst also developing out a new paradigm of scientific looking based on pleasure.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -
