The Descent of Love: Darwin and the Theory of Sexual Selection in American Fiction, 1871-1926 Hardcover - 1996
by Bert Bender
From the rear cover
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.
Details
- Title The Descent of Love: Darwin and the Theory of Sexual Selection in American Fiction, 1871-1926
- Author Bert Bender
- Binding Hardcover
- Edition First Edition
- Pages 456
- Volumes 1
- Language ENG
- Publisher University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, PA, U.S.A.
- Date 1996-04-03
- Illustrated Yes
- Features Bibliography, Illustrated, Index
- ISBN 9780812233445 / 0812233441
- Weight 1.71 lbs (0.78 kg)
- Dimensions 9 x 6 x 1 in (22.86 x 15.24 x 2.54 cm)
- Reading level 1600
- Library of Congress Catalog Number 95042582
- Dewey Decimal Code 813.409
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