Human Forms: The Novel in the Age of Evolution

Abstract

Book Review| March 01 2021 Human Forms: The Novel in the Age of Evolution Human Forms: The Novel in the Age of Evolution. By Duncan, Ian. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019. xiii + 290 pp. Jesse Oak Taylor Jesse Oak Taylor Jesse Oak Taylor is associate professor and director of undergraduate studies in English at the University of Washington. He is author of The Sky of Our Manufacture: The London Fog in British Fiction from Dickens to Woolf (2016) and coeditor of Anthropocene Reading: Literary History in Geologic Times (2017). Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Modern Language Quarterly (2021) 82 (1): 123–126. https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-8742521 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter Email Permissions Search Site Citation Jesse Oak Taylor; Human Forms: The Novel in the Age of Evolution. Modern Language Quarterly 1 March 2021; 82 (1): 123–126. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-8742521 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter Books & JournalsAll JournalsModern Language Quarterly Search Advanced Search Ian Duncan’s Human Forms promises to realign understandings of the realist novel’s relationship to nineteenth-century science. In practice, it does a good deal more. In presenting the novel as “the literary form of the human” (9) even as the human was being radically rethought as a species, subject to natural history, evolution, and eventual extinction, Duncan mounts a vital response to the conjoined disciplinary and planetary crises that see the humanities in decline in the midst of that new “human age,” the Anthropocene. The book’s central claim is that, in the wake of the Enlightenment sciences of “man,” which inscribed the human within natural history, “the novel reorganizes itself as the literary form of the modern scientific conception of a developmental, that is, mutable rather than fixed human nature” (8). Even more striking, to my mind, is the juxtaposition of the human... Copyright © 2021 by University of Washington2021 Issue Section: Reviews You do not currently have access to this content.