"Dying to Know is the work of a distinguished scholar, at the peak of his powers, who is intimately familiar with his materials, and whose knowledge of Victorian fiction and scientific thought is remarkable.
It is usually assumed that this is because the idea of evolution was so staggeringly powerful. Prize-winning author George Levine suggests that much of its influence was due, in fact, to its artistry; to the way it was written.
Without minimising or sentimentalising the harsh qualities of life governed by natural selection, and without deifying Darwin, this text makes a moving case for an enchanted secularism - a commitment to the value of the natural world and ...
How to Read the Victorian Novel unpicks our comfortable expectations of the genre to fully explore just how unfamiliar its familiarity is: emphasizing the complexity and contradictions in Victorian writers' attempts to deal with a world ...
-- The mayor of Casterbridge: reversing the real interlude: Jude and the power of art -- From mindless matter to the art of the mind: The well-beloved -- The poetry of the novels
By exploring Darwin as a writer as well as a scientist, this book transforms our understanding of him, giving us a Darwin who is comic rather than tragic.