Description
Book SynopsisDuncan reorients readers' understanding of the novel's formation during its cultural ascendancy, arguing that fiction produced new knowledge in a period characterized by the interplay between literary and scientific discourses--even as the two were separating into distinct domains.ains.
Trade Review"Duncan’s study is a wide ranging, superbly researched and brilliantly written account of the ways in which the history of the novel is interwoven with the emergence of the new discourse of ‘natural'history, and its logic of an organic transformation of forms and kinds.’ . . . .
Human Forms is a rich and brilliant examination of the complex dynamics between the history of scientific ideas and the development of the novel and, as such, will be invaluable to all those interested in Victorian fiction."
---Iain Crawford, Dickens Quarterly"[An] exhilarating study which follows in the footsteps of Gillian Beer, Sally Shuttleworth, and George Levine in exploring the resonances between nineteenth-century literature and science."
---David Womersley, Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900"Duncan teases out, in intimate detail, the deep engagement between putatively Romantic and Victorian modes of thought and writing. This insight should give present studies of the novel renewed urgency. . . .
Human Forms casts a bright light on the nineteenth-century novel not simply as an accessory to scientific thought, but as a powerful instrument for formulating questions about the status of the human as a social and biological problem"
---Devin Griffiths, Modern Philology
