Science & Technology in Literature, Literary Criticism - General & Miscellaneous, History of Biology & Life Sciences, 20th Century American Literature - General & Miscellaneous - Literary Criticism, Literary Criticism - U.S. Fiction & Prose Literature - G

The Descent of Love

Name: The Descent of Love
Author: Bert Bender
ISBN: 9780812233445

by Bert Bender

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Overview

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.

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Booknews

Bender (English, Arizona State U.) traces the influence of Darwin's theory of sexual selection as it appears in the themes and language of William Dean Howells, Henry James, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Sarah Orne Jewett, Kate Chopin, Harold Frederic, Charles Chesnutt, Edith Wharton, and Ernest Hemingway. His astute analysis uncovers a new perspective in the critique of American realist literature: that the writers' preoccupation with Darwin's work created a dark and violent representation of sexual love, containing within it the seeds of gender, class, and racial debates. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)