Description
This is an outstanding piece of work: original, boldly conceived, deeply researched, analytically subtle, and consistently compelling. Griffiths takes a strikingly different approach to the connection between literary studies and the history of science, exploring their shared intellectual and rhetorical medium in the emergent discourse of comparative historicism. -- Ian Duncan, University of California-Berkeley A "missing link" connects the speculative poetry of Erasmus Darwin to his grandson Charles's Origin of Species: the rise of comparative historicism. So runs the eye-opening, compelling argument of Devin Griffiths's The Age of Analogy. Walter Scott's historically minded novels and Darwin's orchids have never seemed so intimately linked! -- John Plotz, Brandeis University The Age of Analogy does nothing less than create a new way of thinking about the construction of historical and scientific narrative in the long nineteenth century. Griffiths' demonstration of the crucial role played by the humanization of analogical method in the historical novel brilliantly succeeds in tracing the tropological origin of The Origin of Species. More than this, it allows the relations between literary and scientific narrative to be revalued, and the critical periodization of "Romantic" and "Victorian" to be remodeled. A remarkable book. -- Tim Fulford, De Montfort University An enormously ambitious book, moving from Erasmus to Charles Darwin, The Age of Analogy expertly handles several disciplinary discourses. Building on the distinction between "analogy" and "comparison," Griffiths demonstrates how science and literature mutually influence each other, provides exhaustive new readings of Scott and Eliot, and makes important contributions to the histories of literature and science. -- George Levine, Rutgers University The Age of Analogy is a tour-de-force. With an argument both brilliant and moving, Griffiths shows how nineteenth-century writers and scientists created a comparative historicism that shapes modernity as we know it today. Most valuable is his startlingly fresh take on the ties that bind literature and science together. A stunning achievement. -- Lynn Voskuil, University of Houston In The Age of Analogy, Devin Griffiths squares conceptual circles with enormous erudition and aplomb. Bridging the gap between the two Darwins, he maps the evolution of "evolution" onto broader shifts from analogical to historical ways of seeing, via illuminating new readings of key literary texts from Scott to Eliot. -- Martin Priestman, University of Roehampton This is an ambitious, insightful book. While many have recognised the importance of analogy in Charles Darwin's thought, Griffiths reconsiders its role in a bold re-thinking of historical comparativism, revaluing both the eighteenth-century work of Erasmus Darwin, as well the Romantic and Victorian writings of Scott and Tennyson. A major contribution. -- David Amigoni, Keele University
About the Author
Devin Griffiths, a former biologist who studied artificial evolution, is an assistant professor of English at the University of Southern California.
Reviews
This is a serious, detailed, and convincing account with few unexplored avenues... Recommended. All academic levels/libraries. Choice Recommended. Choice The Age of Analogy represents a valuable contribution to scholarship on literature and science. Building on the established models of new historicism and of Gillian Beer's foundational work on Darwinism, it nonetheless offers something new by asking researchers in this field to think more carefully about the kinds of historicism that operate both in their own work and in nineteenth-century literary and scientific writing Review of English Studies For those interested in either of the intertwined histories of literature and science -- or in what we might more generously call the intellectual culture of the 1780s through the 1850s -- Griffiths' book is both readable and richly rewarding. Review 19 This ambitious work should shape future thinking about historicism, science and literature in the nineteenth century and beyond in new and significant ways. Griffiths deserves to be congratulated on having achieved this and, in the process, on having written some of the best recent criticism on Charles Darwin and George Eliot in particular, which is no mean feat in itself. British Society for Literature and Science
Book Information
ISBN 9781421420769
Author Devin Griffiths
Format Hardback
Page Count 352
Imprint Johns Hopkins University Press
Publisher Johns Hopkins University Press
Weight(grams) 612g
Dimensions(mm) 229mm * 152mm * 29mm