Colonies, Cults and Evolution: Literature, Science and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Writing »

David Amigoni is Professor of Victorian Literature at Keele University.

A fascinating study of the intellectual links between evolutionary science and literature.

Acknowledgements     x
Introduction: literature, science and the hothouse of culture     1
'Symbolical of more important things': writing science, religion and colonialism in Coleridge's 'culture'     31
'Our origin, what matters it?': Wordsworth's excursive portmanteau of culture     57
Charles Darwin's entanglements with stray colonists: cultivation and the species question     84
'In one another's being mingle': biology and the dissemination of 'culture' after 1859     104
Samuel Butler's symbolic offensives: colonies and mechanical devices in the margins of evolutionary writing     142
Edmund Gosse's cultural evolution: sympathetic magic, imitation and contagious literature     164
Conclusion: culture's field, culture's vital robe     187
Notes     193
Bibliography     223
Index     234