Book Reviews
Did George Eliot Read Darwin? The Relationship between Darwinism and Novel Development in the 19th Century
“Coming into the world without form, unbound to a special task or function, man takes on all forms and functions, fills the world and consumes it, making his own nature and making nature his own”, Ian Duncan writes in the introduction of his most recent book, Human Forms. The Novel in the Age of Evolution (9), an interdisciplinary analysis of the interaction between evolutionary theories and the development of the novel in the 19th century. The author, Professor and Florence Green Bixby Chair in English at the University of California, Berkeley, creates a simultaneously vast and detailed picture of how the debates on human nature led up to Darwin’s theory of evolution.
23.01.2026
