Romantic Evolutions: Introduction

Abstract

Though the Romantic era is often imagined as the “age of revolution,” recent criticism in the field has seen renewed interest in Romanticism's relationship to evolution, including the resurgence of such topics as organicism, vitalism, natural history, and natural philosophy, as well as other salient themes from the physical and life sciences. This essay offers a contextual introduction for a cluster of articles around the topic of evolution as a concept for literary theory and criticism in Romantic studies, articles that focus critical attention on complex evolutionary ideas like contingency, chance, species transformation, monstrosity, extinction, and the inhuman. The aim of Romantic Evolutions is to reimagine prevailing notions of evolution by tracing their modern origins to literary, cultural, and scientific discourses of the transitional period 1775–1859, a time that witnessed the genesis of the modern idea of “literature” alongside of the emergence of specialized disciplines, such as geology, biology, physiology, chemistry, psychology, and anthropology. Instead of searching through 18th‐ and early 19th‐century science for “forerunners” to the Darwinian revolution, the essays in the volume focus attention on the important contributions of Romantic poets, philosophers, and scientists who have too often been overlooked by the empirical sciences. And yet, by shifting the central focus away from Darwin and his theory of natural selection, contributors also revisit his relationship to Romanticism with fresh eyes. Taken together, the volume seeks to provoke a reevaluation of our current understanding of the Romantic conception of evolution, one that will open new critical perspectives and orientations for scholars within and beyond the field.