Response

Abstract

This response to the series of articles on the theme of “Romanticism and Evolution” considers the collective significance of the essays gathered here. It considers the representation of slowness, the idea of the imagination, and the relation between the living and the non‐living to think about how romantic writing helped to create the conditions of possibility out of which evolutionary theory emerged, and also how it might question the very idea of development commonly associated with evolution. The response thus highlights overlapping concerns and significant differences in the collected essays while pointing the way for future research.