The descent of love : Darwin and the theory of sexual selection in American fiction, 1871-1926

The Resource The descent of love : Darwin and the theory of sexual selection in American fiction, 1871-1926
Label
The descent of love : Darwin and the theory of sexual selection in American fiction, 1871-1926
Title remainder
Darwin and the theory of sexual selection in American fiction, 1871-1926
Statement of responsibility
Bert Bender
Creator
Subject
Genre
Language
eng
Summary
  • Upon its publication in 1871, Charles Darwin's The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex sent shock waves through the scientific community and the public at large. In an original and persuasive study, Bert Bender demonstrates that it is this treatise, rather than any of Darwin's earlier works, that provoked the most immediate and vigorous response from American fiction writers
  • These authors embraced and incorporated Darwin's theories, insights, and language, creating an increasingly dark and violent view of sexual love in American realist literature
  • In The Descent of Love, Bender carefully rereads the works of William Dean Howells, Henry James, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Sarah Orne Jewett, Kate Chopin, Harold Frederic, Charles W. Chesnutt, Edith Wharton, and Ernest Hemingway, teasing from them a startling but utterly convincing preoccupation with questions of sexual selection
  • Competing for readership as novelists who best grasped the "real" nature of human love, these writers also participated in a heated social debate over racial and sexual differences and the nature of sex itself
  • Influenced more by The Descent of Man than by the Origin of Species, Bender's novelists built upon Darwin's anthropological and zoological materials to anatomize their characters' courtship behavior, returning consistently to concerns with physical beauty, natural dominance, and the power to select a mate
Additional physical form
Also issued online.
Cataloging source
DLC
Dewey number
813/.409354
Government publication
government publication of a state province territory dependency etc
Illustrations
illustrations
Index
index present
LC call number
PS374.L6
LC item number
B46 1996
Literary form
non fiction
Nature of contents
bibliography

Context

Context of The descent of love : Darwin and the theory of sexual selection in American fiction, 1871-1926

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