Evolutionary Discourse Research Articles

Bengal Delta, Charland Formation, and Riparian Hazards: Why Is a Flexible Planning Approach Needed for Deltaic Systems?

A comprehensive understanding of the dynamic characteristics of geomorphological, ecological, and human systems is essential to explaining complex charland (mid-channel island) processes and crafting and implementing policy measures. This work demonstrates that the characteristics and outcomes of riparian hazards are determined by the interactive dynamics between hydrogeology and human conditions, which constitutes a novel contribution to the literature in this research area. We further contend that such dynamic social-ecological systems demand a flexible, adaptive management and planning approach. The present research has three key interdisciplinary objectives: (i) to analyze the salient features and characteristics of the geomorphological and riparian systems of the Bengal Delta; (ii) to analyze the evolutionary discourse of the legal systems concerning eroded (diluvion) and accreted (alluvion) land in Bangladesh; and (iii) to assess the characteristics of the coping and adaptation strategies employed by charland inhabitants. The findings of this research reveal that delta-building processes, which are characterized by dynamic shifts in the river channels, along with the erosion and accretion of charlands have made Bangladesh’s land and water systems very dynamic and unstable. The destabilization of these systems increases the inhabitants’ vulnerability to riparian hazards, which consistently results in the displacement of settlers and, consequently, a serious deterioration in their socioeconomic status. At present, Bangladesh does not have an effective institutional framework and structure for resettlement planning; therefore, the formulation of a comprehensive national resettlement policy with adequate flexibility to adapt to changing scenarios is urgently needed.

Shared reproductive disruption, not neural crest or tameness, explains the domestication syndrome.

Altered neural crest cell (NCC) behaviour is an increasingly cited explanation for the domestication syndrome in animals. However, recent authors have questioned this explanation, while others cast doubt on whether domestication syndrome even exists. Here, we review published literature concerning this syndrome and the NCC hypothesis, together with recent critiques of both. We synthesize these contributions and propose a novel interpretation, arguing shared trait changes under ancient domestication resulted primarily from shared disruption of wild reproductive regimes. We detail four primary selective pathways for 'reproductive disruption' under domestication and contrast these succinct and demonstrable mechanisms with cryptic genetic associations posited by the NCC hypothesis. In support of our perspective, we illustrate numerous important ways in which NCCs contribute to vertebrate reproductive phenotypes, and argue it is not surprising that features derived from these cells would be coincidentally altered under major selective regime changes, as occur in domestication. We then illustrate several pertinent examples of Darwin's 'unconscious selection' in action, and compare applied selection and phenotypic responses in each case. Lastly, we explore the ramifications of reproductive disruption for wider evolutionary discourse, including links to wild 'self-domestication' and 'island effect', and discuss outstanding questions.

Expressivism, Pluralism, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's “A Suggestion on the Negro Problem”

Expressivism, Pluralism, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's “A Suggestion on the Negro Problem”

Introduction: Form and Medium

Introduction: Form and Medium

Food as we knew it: Food processing as an evolutionary discourse

BackgroundThe Industrial Revolution presented technological advancements that improved shelflife, palatability, convenience, availability, and safety of foods. These advancements led to reduced micronutrient-related diseases, greater food diversity, and enhanced food security; however, their chronic consumption, starting in the 1960s, has been implicated in epidemics of diet-related chronic diseases. Scope and approachThis commentary implies that diet potentially alters the human genome, evidenced by isolated populations consuming high starch versus low starch over successive generations. The control of fire and subsequent application to cooking illustrate that food processing potentially acts as an evolutionary discourse, and selective pressure favors less tooth dentation. Each is important to establish that the lack of whole food structure, the introduction of xenobiotics, and refined components in ultra-processed foods is an evolutionary discourse. Key findings and conclusionsOver the past 100 years, the displacement of dietary patterns that include meals and dishes prepared from whole or minimally processed foods by those increasingly based on ultra-processed foods and drinks has occurred globally. Such rapid, neoteric changes to food choice/diet had not occurred since the onset of bipedally when Neanderthals ventured from the forest searching for new food sources in response to changing climates. Only time can tell if changes imparted by ultra-processed foods being Western Society's staple represent a significant enough environmental discourse to drive evolutionary adaptations. Epidemiological studies are already pointing to the parallel between the globalization of UPF consumption and the rapid emergence of chronic non-communicable diseases worldwide (244 words).

The origin of human morality: An evolutionary perspective on Mencius’s notion of sympathy

ABSTRACT This paper investigates Mencius’s notion of sympathy from the perspective of evolutionary biology. First, I point out that Mencius and evolutionary biologists concur that humans are endowed with a unique ability to sympathize with others beyond kin and friends. Subsequently, I offer an analytic account from an evolutionary perspective on how this ability emerged and developed as an innate human quality—especially referencing recent theories that state that cooperation is a crucial factor that helped foster such a quality. Further, this paper addresses in-group/out-group distinction in terms of the scope of sympathy. In particular, I respond to Donald Munro’s thesis that this distinction serves as a critical boundary for the workings of sympathy. Finally, I show that Mencius’s (and other Confucian thinkers’) thoughts on sympathy are not only compatible with modern evolutionary discourses but also contribute to the psychological mechanisms that may have enabled humans to regard others with sympathetic concern. Thus, this essay sheds light on the mechanisms of sympathy that Mencius and other Confucian thinkers illustrated as identifying oneself or one’s kin with others. I then surmise that such mechanisms most likely emerged as a fundamental psychological principle for humans initially reaching out to others.

The Dynamics of Progress and Regress in Rossetti’s “Eden Bower”: Lilith as a Degenerative Force?

The Victorian period was characterized by scientific discoveries in various fields, most notably Darwin’s theory of evolution, which had an enduring influence and triggered various responses from the social and natural scientists of the period. This interdisciplinary dialogue on the topic paved the way for the emergence of the evolutionary discourse in which the terms “progression”, “regression”, and “degeneration” occupied a central place. Likewise, Dante Gabriel Rossetti problematized the dichotomy between progress and regress in his ballad “Eden Bower,” which revisits the biblical narrative of the Fall. This study argues that Dante Gabriel Rossetti actually comments on the Victorian discussions on the alternative routes of evolution through his treatment of Lilith as a metamorphosing protagonist. It explores how Rossetti represents Lilith’s mobility on the ladder of evolution to reveal the Victorian anxiety concerning the degenerative nature of women and present the reader his understanding of history. Delving into Rossetti’s juxtaposition of the metaphysical and the scientific accounts of the history of human kind, the essay responds to the existing scholarship on the poem that tends to interpret Rossetti’s treatment of Lilith in terms of moral conceptions and the stereotypical figure of the Victorian femme fatale.

Ecological Poetics; or, Wallace Stevens’s Birds by Cary Wolfe

Reviewed by: Ecological Poetics; or, Wallace Stevens’s Birds by Cary Wolfe Joshua Corey Ecological Poetics; or, Wallace Stevens’s Birds. By Cary Wolfe. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2020. In his new book, Cary Wolfe, a scholar of poetics in the American grain turned bioethicist and thought leader in the new field of posthumanism, cogently and often brilliantly rereads Wallace Stevens as a practitioner of what we might call second-order ecopoetics—a poetry that is less interested in describing the natural world than it is in demonstrating and enacting on a stylistic level what Timothy Morton has called “ecological thought.” For Wolfe, the otherness of “nature” in Stevens’s late work, as in Emerson’s, is a phantom, a reified and ideological image that conceals the environmental thinking of a poetics constantly returning to an insight disclosed by systems theory: “what look like opposites on the surface of things—subject vs. object, let’s say, or mind vs. nature—turn out, upon closer inspection, to share a deeper, paradoxical unity. They are two sides of a distinction that gives form to the world, but here ‘form’ is indissociable from function, enaction, and performativity” (ix; italics in original). As Stevens said in a quotation to which Wolfe often returns, “it is not [the poet’s role] to lead people out of the confusion in which they find themselves. . . . His role . . . is to help people to live their lives” (CPP 660–61). Living poetically, for Wolfe’s Stevens, takes place in and through the confusion or fusion of imagination and reality, the observer and the observed, the human and the inhuman. This comparatively short book is dense with divergent discourses masterfully handled by Wolfe, who proves himself as familiar with canonical Stevens criticism (by Helen Vendler, Harold Bloom, J. Hillis Miller, and others) as he is agile with the terminology of theoretical biology, Derridean deconstruction, Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory, and Peter Sloterdijk’s wildly ambitious philosophical trilogy Spheres. At the center of Wolfe’s argument is “a nonrepresentationalist understanding of poiesis: whether we are talking about the poiesis of ‘life’ and the evolution of the biosphere in theoretical biology, or the poiesis of worlding and world-making in deconstruction, or the poiesis of Stevens’s poetic practice” (61; italics in original). Wolfe’s third chapter demonstrates morphological similarities between Derridean deconstruction and theoretical biology, both of which critique models of representational truth and propose instead, in the words of sociologist Vicki Kirby, that “the one who knows, the measuring apparatus and the object to be interpreted are strangely involved” (qtd. on 62). Building upon the work of Christopher Johnson, whose System and Writing in the Philosophy of Jacques Derrida outlines some of the “crosstalk between deconstruction and the life sciences” (69), Wolfe argues that the object of knowledge in deconstruction behaves like a living organism that derives its activity from the interchange with its environment, its meaning irreducible to and unexhausted by our understanding of that environment; he writes that [End Page 289] “Derrida gives us a theory of something like the relationship of the genetic (or systemic, formally code-bound) and the epigenetic factors (the environmental or contextual setting in which the code is deployed)” (72). Deconstruction, in other words, is an evolutionary discourse. Wolfe cites Matthias Fritsch’s summary of Derrida’s key neologism, différance: “The term is to encompass difference and deferral—that is, situation in context but without final determinability, anticipation of future environments (for not anything goes), but also exposure to the open-ended future the elements in an ongoing system cannot know” (qtd. on 71). From here it is but a short step to the key Darwinian concept of exaptation, by which a trait developed by a species in response to environmental conditions shifts its function, as in the example Wolfe adapts from Stuart Kauffman of the swim bladder in fish: “The Darwinian exaptation whereby some early versions of fish had lungs, enabling them to bounce from puddle to puddle, led in time to the biological function of a ratio of air and water in fish that now live wholly in water that allows neutral buoyancy in the water column” (79...

The Paleo paradox: Re-wilding as a health strategy across scales in the anthropocene

In an era of environmental anxiety, “re-wilding” has emerged as an ecological health and resiliency strategy across scales in the Anthropocene, from the human body to the planet. At the scale of the body, this has meant a reevaluation of dietary, consumption, and lifestyle behaviors among concerned consumers seeking to create healthy, resilient bodily ecosystems. Recent health trends including the Paleo Diet and Ancestral Health movements call upon an evolutionary perspective for insight as to how to re-wild one’s bodily ecosystem in the face of ecological crisis across scales, using the Paleolithic era as a benchmark for dietary and behavioral re-wilding. This paper draws upon interviews with individuals adhering to a Paleo Diet to better understand whether and how the evolutionary discourse of Paleo influences their beliefs about healthy diet and lifestyles, and how they grapple with re-wilding in an urban context. This paper elucidates the paradoxical “ancestral futurism” of the Paleo movement, where re-wilding bodies and lifestyles in the name of health and sustainability is predicated upon the same technologies, spaces, political-economic structure, and human agency that created the messy ecological uncertainty of the Anthropocene.

The Connection between Charles Darwin's Evolutionary Theory of 'Heredity of Behaviors' and the 19th Century Neuroscience: The Influence of Neuroscience on Darwin's Overcoming of Lamarck's Theory of Evolution.

The nineteenth century neuroscience studied the instinct of animal to understand the human mind. In particular, it has been found that the inheritance of unconscious behavior like instinct is mediated through ganglion chains, such as the spinal cord or sympathetic nervous system, which control unconscious reflexes. At the same time, the theory of Inheritance of Acquired Characteristics (hereafter 'IAC') widely known as Lamarck's evolutionary theory provided the theoretical frame on the origin of instinct and the heredity of action that the parental generation's habits were converted into the nature of the offspring generation. Contrary to conventional knowledge, this theory was not originally invented by Lamarck, and Darwin also did not discard this theory even after discovering the theory of natural selection in 1838 and maintained it throughout his intellectual life. Above all, in the field of epigenetics, the theory of 'IAC' has gained attention as a reliable scientific theory today. Darwin discovered crucial errors in the late 1830s that the Lamarck version's theory of 'IAC' did not adequately account for the principle of the inheritance of unconscious behavior like instinct. Lamarck's theory regarded habits as conscious and willful acts and saw that those habits are transmitted through the brain to control conscious actions. Lamarck's theory could not account for the complex and elaborate instincts of invertebrate animals, such as brainless ants. Contrary to Lamarck's view, Darwin established the new theory of 'IAC' that could be combined with contemporary neurological theory, which explains the heredity of unconscious behavior. Based on the knowledge of neurology, Darwin was able to translate the 'principle of habit' into a neurological term called 'principle of reflex'. This article focuses on how Darwin join the theory of 'IAC' with nineteenth century neuroscience and how the neurological knowledge from the nineteenth century contributed to Darwin's overcoming of Lamarck's 'IAC'. The significance of this study is to elucidate Darwin's notion of 'IAC' theory rather than natural selection theory as a principle of heredity of behavior. The theory of 'IAC' was able to account for the rapid variation of instincts in a relatively short period of time, unlike natural selection, which operates slowly in geological time spans of tens of millions of years. The nineteenth century neurological theory also provided neurological principles for 'plasticity of instinct,' empirically supporting the fact that all nervous systems responsible for reflexes respond sensitively to very fine stimuli. However, researchers of neo-Darwinian tendencies, such as Richard Dawkins and evolutionary psychologists advocating the 'selfish gene' hypothesis, which today claim to be Darwin's descendants, are characterized by human nature embedded in biological information, such as the brain and genes, so that it cannot change at all. This study aims to contribute to reconstructing the evolutionary discourse by illuminating Darwin's insights into the "plasticity of nature" that instincts can change relatively easily even at the level of invertebrates such as earthworms.

Charles Darwin and the Victorian Pre-History of Climate Denial

Recent theorists of the response to anthropogenic climate change have focused on what Naomi Klein terms “soft denial”: the tendency to accept the scientific consensus while continuing to live as if it were not true. This essay contends that this divided state of mind can be tracked back to the nineteenth century: specifically, in the response to the new biological paradigm articulated most cogently by Charles Darwin in On the Origin of Species (1859). In what follows, I discuss this tension in relation to Victorian evolutionary discourse and in a number of key literary works of the period, including Alfred Tennyson’s In Memoriam (1850) and Idylls of the King (1859–85), H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895), and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899).

Sandor Rado, American psychoanalysis, and the question of bisexuality.

The Hungarian-born physician and psychoanalyst Sandor Rado (1890-1972), who practiced for most of his career in the United States, played a central role in shaping American psychoanalysts' views toward homosexuality. Historians have pointed to Rado's rejection of Freud's notion of constitutional bisexuality as the key theoretical maneuver that both pathologized homosexuality and inspired an optimistic approach to its treatment. Yet scholarly analysis of the arguments that Rado made for his rejection of bisexuality is lacking. This article seeks to provide that analysis, by carefully reviewing and evaluating Rado's arguments by the standards of his own day. Because one of Rado's main arguments is that bisexuality is an outdated concept according to modern biology, I consider what contemporary biologists had to say on the topic. The work of behavioral endocrinologist Frank Beach (1911-1988) is important in this context and receives significant attention here. Rado ultimately distanced himself from Beach's behavioral endocrinology, appealing instead to evolutionary discourse to buttress his claim that homosexuality is pathological. This tactic allowed him to refashion psychoanalysis into a moralistic discipline, one with closer ties to a medical school. (PsycINFO Database Record

"On a Wet Rock in the Atlantic": J. M. Synge and Ethnographies of the Irish Revival

"On a Wet Rock in the Atlantic":J. M. Synge and Ethnographies of the Irish Revival John Brannigan (bio) Dec. 1. I have been reading Herbert Spencer and my creed is now very simple. Humanity has evolved from the conditions of the world, and will return to the nothing it has come from. Each separate life is but a ripple on the waves,—a blade of grass on the roadside. For those who fail, there is no hope. They are like the dead leaves in autumn, blown here and there before their final dissolution. In my useless agony I am only hurtful to my fellows. Why should I endure it?1 John Synge's "Étude Morbide," written around 1899, takes the form of "an imaginary portrait," and thus does not pretend to provide autobiographical statements of any authority.2 There are shades here of the Bohemian student who had spent much of the 1890s in Germany, Italy, and France studying European culture, but within a few years Synge had established himself as the most gifted playwright of the Irish literary revival, before his early death from Hodgkin's disease in 1909. The author of Riders to the Sea (1904) and The Playboy of the Western World (1907), Synge's transformation was rooted in his immersion in the language and folklore of the West of Ireland, particularly the Aran Islands. However, in reflecting the impact of evolutionary debates about humanity and degeneration upon the sensibility of the artist, "Étude Morbide" provides some indications of how we might contextualize Synge's encounters with the primitive and the aboriginal on the Aran Islands in relation to his contemporaneous preoccupations with the legacies of Darwinism.3 Synge's choice of [End Page 329] metaphors for the figure of bare humanity are conventional—"a ripple on the waves … a blade of grass on the roadside"—yet distinctly apt given the propensity in his writings for the sea and the roadside as topographical markers of marginal modernity. Similarly, "those who fail" are likened, somewhat predictably, to "dead leaves in autumn, blown here and there before their final dissolution," an image resonant with W. B. Yeats's later reference to "those our civilization must reject," and only ameliorated by Synge's identification of himself with the doomed failures of humanity.4 The work to which Synge refers, Spencer's Principles of Psychology (published in 1855, four years prior to Darwin's The Origin of the Species), argues that "life attains to more and more perfect forms" through an evolutionary process in which the "unfit" fail to survive, and the "fit" progress more and more towards an ideal or archetype.5 It is a "creed" which the artist finds incontestable, but which engenders despondency. At least on a personal level, however, relief from this despondency lies at the margins of modernity: May 5. I am in the country at last—near the end of Finisterre. Since I came here my daily readings of the saints and Stoics have lost their interest, and I live simply and naturally as the peasants do. This ordeal I have passed through has left me without a trace of apprehension. My system saved me, yet when I look back on it now, it seems a childish escapade. I have my fiddle here and I make the peasants dance in the evenings. My skin shivers while I play to see that in spite of the agony of the world there are still men and women joyous enough to leap and skip with exultation. (Synge, "Étude Morbide," 32–33) As James Knapp argues, Synge's The Aran Islands (1907) depicts his encounters with the "primitivism" of the islanders in much the same terms, but without "the tone of weary decadence" notable in his characterization of the artist in Brittany.6 The narrative tone may be refined and clarified, yet the relationship between these cultures "on the edge" of modernity and evolutionary discourses of primitivism, degeneration, and civilization is substantially the same. When Synge turns to Brittany and Aran as sources of cultural renewal it is not as "wild places" beyond the reaches of modernity, but as liminal spaces in an increasingly powerful transatlantic economy, capable...

THE CONDITION OF MUSIC IN VICTORIAN SCHOLARSHIP

Many Victorian commentators, from Herbert Spencer and Charles Darwin on, saw music as the most primitive of all the arts, an inarticulate precursor of language, and yet many Victorians, particularly towards the end of the century, also saw music as the purest of all art forms. The tremendous tension between these two views meant that music provided, and provides, an ideal way to understand more completely Victorian ideas about evolution, gender, and race in relation to aesthetics, although scholarship on music has only begun to consider those relationships. But as Vernon Lee long ago pointed out, in a series of thoughtful essays about music published inFraser's Magazineand other periodicals in the 1870s and 1880s, music has always been slower to develop than other arts or fields of study. This is in fact why musicologists speak of “nineteenth-century music,” rather than Victorian music: the Romantic period in music, for example, is starting as the Romantic period in literature had largely ended; the English Musical Renaissance comes after the renaissance period in British literature; and so on. Musicology, likewise, is a comparatively young field, and the study of nineteenth-century British music – long limited to Gilbert and Sullivan, if considered at all – younger yet. Studies of literature that engage with music as an important part of the historical context of a given text depend on developments in musicology for a proper understanding of that context, which is why such works are comparatively few.Whymusic should be slower to develop than other fields is a question outside the scope of this essay, but the good news is that in the past ten years a number of useful and valuable works of scholarship on nineteenth-century British music have appeared, examining not only neglected composers and musical works, but also performers, concert organizers, music publishers, instruments and their history, and evolutionary, Orientalist, and nationalist discourses about music. This scholarship, valuable in itself, not only expands our knowledge of musicology and cultural history; by pointing out some of the deep connections between literature and music in the Victorian period, such scholarship also suggests new ways to think about literary forms, canon formation, and aesthetic theories.

Neptunism and Transformism: Robert Jameson and other Evolutionary Theorists in Early Nineteenth-Century Scotland.

This paper sheds new light on the prevalence of evolutionary ideas in Scotland in the early nineteenth century and establish what connections existed between the espousal of evolutionary theories and adherence to the directional history of the earth proposed by Abraham Gottlob Werner and his Scottish disciples. A possible connection between Wernerian geology and theories of the transmutation of species in Edinburgh in the period when Charles Darwin was a medical student in the city was suggested in an important 1991 paper by James Secord. This study aims to deepen our knowledge of this important episode in the history of evolutionary ideas and explore the relationship between these geological and evolutionary discourses. To do this it focuses on the circle of natural historians around Robert Jameson, Wernerian geologist and professor of natural history at the University of Edinburgh from 1804 to 1854. From the evidence gathered here there emerges a clear confirmation that the Wernerian model of geohistory facilitated the acceptance of evolutionary explanations of the history of life in early nineteenth-century Scotland. As Edinburgh was at this time the most important center of medical education in the English-speaking world, this almost certainly influenced the reception and development of evolutionary ideas in the decades that followed.

Hyphy Rap Music, Cooptation, and Black Fanatics in Oakland, CA (1994–2010)

This article applies Richard Iton's concept of the “the Black Fantastic” to the Oakland, CA rap music scene from 1994–2010. I argue that the political content from this scene was part of an evolutionary colonial discourse and a reaction to the commercialization of rap music. In particular, my finding is that this local discourse was in response to hyper-militarization during the 1970s and 1980s and the co-optation of local rap's subaltern discourse elements in the 1990s and early 2000s. This produced a “black fanatic”—both the population making the music and the population participating in the shows, consumption of goods, and the subversive street activities. This finding, however, adds complexities to the conception of a “post-colonial” and “post-racial” discourse in Iton's analysis. In addition, my investigation uses deep description of the political content of the hyphy subculture to correct the existing research location of the subculture in identity formation studies and disabilities studies. Instead, I hold that the political power exhibited by hyphy rappers was the power to “act” crazy and should be considered in the same vein as Malcolm X's attempt to thwart the military draft and other cases of “liberal disillusionment” by black representatives.

Nadja Durbach, Spectacle of Deformity: Freak Shows and Modern British Culture (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2010), pp. xiii + 273, £27.95/$39.95, hardback, ISBN: 978-0-520-25768-9.

Nadja Durbach, Spectacle of Deformity: Freak Shows and Modern British Culture (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2010), pp. xiii + 273, £27.95/$39.95, hardback, ISBN: 978-0-520-25768-9. - Volume 55 Issue 4

Liberation and Containment: Re-visualising the Eugenic and Evolutionary Ideal of the Fizkul'turnitsa in 1944

In July 1944 cross-country races and parades of physical culturists were prominently used to celebrate Soviet liberation from German occupation. While journalistic accounts stressed the manly health and vigour of the victorious Red Army, press photographs in Pravda and Red Sport, and Aleksandr Deneika's monumental painting ‘Liberation’, emphasised images of the young female physical culturist. This essay explores what a contextualised analysis of these images may have to tell historians about the connections between women, physical culture and liberation being projected. The argument suggests that, on one level, the images straightforwardly symbolised and celebrated the liberation of the Soviet ‘Motherland’. On another, more complex level, the images represented a particularly nuanced notion of constricted liberation for Soviet women deriving from 1920s eugenic and evolutionary discourse, inscribed into the contemporary imperative for engagement with physical culture as a necessary stage of healthful body discipline on the path to hygienic and successful motherhood.

(R)Evolutionary Rhetorics: Science and Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century Free-Love Discourse

Nineteenth-century women speaking to promiscuous audiences about the taboo topics of sex and sexuality found evolutionary science an ally, rather than an enemy, to their aims. Feminists arguing for free love promoted their arguments with the popular evolutionary discourse. This essay identifies three warrants in their arguments with a basis in Darwin's theories of evolution and sexual selection.

The Victorian Novel by Louis James

MLR, 102.3, 2007 841 subtlety,and penetration ofHartman's own work, aswell as being in itselfan impor tantcontribution to contemporaryWordsworth criticism and toHolocaust studies. UNIVERSITY OF BRISTOL ANDREW BENNETT The Victorian Novel. By Louis JAMES. Oxford: Blackwell. 2oo6. xix+249 pp. ?I6.99. ISBN 978-o-63I-22628-4. Louis James's new study ofVictorian fiction,primarily aimed, we are told, at un dergraduates and postgraduates, enters an overcrowded field,and ifit is tocommand such a readership must clearly offer something new. Certainly James proves to be an authoritative and lively guide, and one who appears almost superhuman in his range of reading and knowledge of thebyways of theVictorian literaryfield.As befits the author of the seminal Fiction for the WorkingMan (London: Oxford University Press, I963), James does justice to theundertow of popular writing of a period whose most-read writer was, after all,G. W. M Reynolds. The Victorian Novel is idiosyncra ticallybut intriguingly sectionalized, so thatafter a light-footed introduction we find sections on thedifferenthistorical eras and a consideration of changing perspectives, involving briefmini-chapters on, for instance, 'History', 'Biography', 'Detectives', and so forth.Each section offersa thoughtful synthesis, but the effectof this format is inevitably short-winded-the threepages on 'Evolution', for instance, neatly canvass the roles of Erasumus Darwin, Malthus, Lyell, et al., and evolutionary discourse is conflatedwith Comte in a breathless and somewhat unsatisfactory outline. This type of structure encourages superficiality of approach and, while there isno quarrel with thecontent of James's outlines, there isquite frequently in these pages an almost ver tiginous sense of being rushed from topic to topicwith littlepause forreflection.This impression of bittiness is reinforced by the remainder of the study,which offersbrief biographical sketches of 'KeyAuthors' and then discussion of the import and impli cation of some apparently self-identifying 'Main Texts'. James rounds offhis study with a furtherset of brief essays on 'Topics', ranging fromchildren's fiction through colonial novels to historical fiction, and including some welcome consideration of book illustration, the regional novel, and scientific fantasy.Some of thismaterial is sharp and authoritative, as witness the useful snapshot of publishing practices, but the overall trajectory sacrifices focus and depth to an unfeasible degree of inclusi vity.As a handy work of reference The Victorian Novel may have its attractions for hard-pressed essay-writers, no doubt, but there are toomany areas towhich such a resolutely untheorized and empirical account of theVictorian novel turns a blind eye. The claim of the publisher's blurb that James writes 'without critical jargon' may be taken in a number of ways, and certainly masks a blindness to, or occlusion of, recentwork in the field.To take just one small but significant instance, in the sug gestions for 'Further Reading' the entry on Hardy contains nothing published after I975-scarcely a just reflection of the state of textual and interpretative debate on Hardy's texts in thispostmodern 'moment'. The student searching fora breezy and well-informed survey ofVictorian fictionwill find sustenance in James's pages, but the ellipses involved in such a positivist approach seriously compromise this partial and fragmented account. In a generally 'clean' text I noted the following errors: p. 53 'Landor' (forLandow); p. 220 'Lesley Stephen'; p. 232 'Bregonzi'. LOUGHBOROUGH UNIVERSITY ROGER EBBATSON ...