Tag Archives: Charles Darwin
B. Ashton Nichols
PUBLICATIONS: BOOKS: As Author: Beyond Romantic Ecocriticism: Toward Urbanatural Roosting (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), part of the Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters series. Series Editor, Marilyn Gaull. Nominated for the John Burroughs Medal and the American Publishers Prose Prize (a … Continue reading
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Tagged Ashton Nichols, Charles Darwin, evolution, natural history, poetry, prose, Romanticism, science
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Erasmus Darwin and the Frankenstein “Mistake”
Mary Shelley refers directly to Erasmus Darwin in the “Introduction” to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein. She says: Many and long were the conversations between Lord Byron and Shelley, to which I was a devout but nearly silent listener. During … Continue reading
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Tagged Charles Darwin, Erasmus Darwin, Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
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Monkeys, Men, and Man-Apes
Depictions of monkey’s and apes in natural histories by Buffon , Jardine, Goldsmith (and others) led to confusion and anxiety on the part of natural historians and the general public. Long before Darwin and Mendel, similarities between simians and humans … Continue reading
Humans as a Species of Animal
The complex issue of human races, and the relationship of the human race to the rest of the animal kingdom, was one of the most hotly contested topics in the history of natural history. Monogenesis claimed that all human beings … Continue reading
Darwin’s Evolution: A New Gallery of Images
Darwin’s Evolution: Image Gallery Introduction: From Aristotle to Erasmus Darwin . . . Pliny the Elder died on Vesuvius (N.I.H.) Darwin’s Fly-trap (Botanic Garden, 1794, author copy) I. The Natural Historians: Linnaeus, Merian, Buffon, Cuvier, Catesby, … Continue reading
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The Anxiety of Species: Toward a Romantic Natural History
[first published in The Wordsworth Circle 28:3 (1997): 130-36] We sometimes think that the concept of mutable species burst on the world like a thunderclap with the 1859 publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species. So great was Darwin’s own … Continue reading
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Tagged Blake, Charles Darwin, ecology, Erasmus Darwin, natural history, poetry, Romanticism, Shelley
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Backgrounds: From Aristotle to Erasmus Darwin
For the ancients, mythology suggested powerful interconnections among the natural, the human, and the imaginary. Gods were like humans, humans were like animals, animals were like plants, plants were like humans, and vice versa. Spontaneous generation, parthenogenesis by fire, impregnation … Continue reading
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Tagged Aristotle, astronomy, Charles Darwin, Erasmus Darwin, myth, poetry, science
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Charles Darwin
Charles Darwin was perhaps the naturalist most responsible for altering humanity’s view of nature (and human nature) over the past two centuries. Darwin’s main idea was not new, nor was it complete, but his belief that species evolved over time … Continue reading
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Tagged Charles Darwin, Erasmus Darwin, evolution, science
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Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Tennyson (1809-1892) is not the last Romantic, but he is the last poet of the nineteenth-century to fully capture, in his early poems, the lyrical spirit of his great predecessors. An early poem like “Timbuctoo” echoes the naturalistic cadences of … Continue reading
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Tagged Charles Darwin, evolution, poetry, science, Victorian
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