The Descent of Love: Darwin and the Theory of Sexual Selection in American Fiction, 1871-1926
- ISBN-10
- 1512814296
- ISBN-13
- 9781512814293
- Category
- Literary Criticism
- Pages
- 457
- Language
- English
- Published
- 2015-11-16
- Publisher
- University of Pennsylvania Press
- Author
- Bert Bender
Description
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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