Description
Book SynopsisHow did literature shape nineteenth-century science?Erasmus Darwin and his grandson, Charles, were the two most important evolutionary theorists of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain. Although their ideas and methods differed, both Darwins were prolific and inventive writers: Erasmus composed several epic poems and scientific treatises, while Charles is renowned both for his collected journals (now titled The Voyage of the Beagle) and for his masterpiece, The Origin of Species. In The Age of Analogy, Devin Griffiths argues that the Darwins' writing style was profoundly influenced by the poets, novelists, and historians of their era. The Darwins, like other scientists of the time, labored to refashion contemporary literary models into a new mode of narrative analysis that could address the contingent world disclosed by contemporary natural science. By employing vivid language and experimenting with a variety of different genres, these writers gave rise to a new relational study
Trade Review[A] serious, detailed, and convincing account with few unexplored avenues. Recommended.
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ChoiceThe Age of Analogy represents a valuable contribution to scholarship on literature and science. Building on the established models of new historicism and of Gillian Beer's foundational work on Darwinism, it nonetheless offers something new by asking researchers in this field to think more carefully about the kinds of historicism that operate both in their own work and in nineteenth-century literary and scientific writing.
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Review of English StudiesThe Age of Analogy is perhaps the most ambitious and important book on the entanglement of nineteenth-century scientific culture and literature to have been written this century—in a field of highly ambitious and truly important books. But it also elucidates the entanglement of nineteenth-century culture with our own, bringing light to contemporary historicist practices, particularly in literary studies.
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IsisFor those interested in either of the intertwined histories of literature and science—or in what we might more generously call the intellectual culture of the 1780s through the 1850s—Griffiths' book is both readable and richly rewarding.
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Review 19This ambitious work should shape future thinking about historicism, science and literature in the nineteenth century and beyond in new and significant ways. Griffiths deserves to be congratulated on having achieved this and, in the process, on having written some of the best recent criticism on Charles Darwin and George Eliot in particular, which is no mean feat in itself.
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British Society for Literature and ScienceThe book is well written and the richness of the study is impressive. It is precisely because of this wide-ranging approach that
The Age of Analogy demonstrates so convincingly that, while the scholarship on analogy is not new, Griffiths takes it to another level where he explores events in a pluralist state of time. This, he terms comparative historicism. As such,
The Age of Analogy makes a valuable contribution to the humanities and sciences.
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MetascienceThe Age of Analogy promises to transform our understanding of literary and scientific history in the Anthropocene. This is a big, challenging, eloquent book. I cannot recommend it highly enough.
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Nineteenth-Century ContextsAs Griffiths builds his argument and examines his literary examples, he, in effect, applies the analogical paradigm he theorized in the opening chapters, generating a compelling set of insights into modes of thought that circulated in the first half of the nineteenth century, some of which continue to shape and define our own times. A necessary intervention.
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Journal of British Studies[A] deeply impressive book.
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SEL Studies in English Literature 1500–1900Ambitious in its scope and vision and eloquently written,
The Age of Analogy is a challenging and thought-provoking study that gives us new and enriching ways to read nineteenth-century intellectual history
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Dickens QuarterlyWhat is exhilarating about
The Age of Analogy is its bold insistence upon the utility of imaginative literary form as an active agent in science, with the power not only to reflect knowledge of the world but to add to it as well.
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Literature and HistoryA book of enormous erudition, especially for a first book. Great books change how criticism does its business, this happens far more rarely than one might think.
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Wordsworth CircleThe Age of Analogy promises to transform our understanding of literary and scientific history in the Anthropocene. This is a big, challenging, eloquent book. I cannot recommend it highly enough.
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Nineteenth-Century ContextsDevin Griffith's multifaceted, richly textured
The Age of Analogy argues that the nineteenth century saw the emergence of a new mode of engaging with history—'comparative historicism'—that increasingly fostered what Griffiths calls a 'flat' view of temporal existence. Griffith's method exemplifies the same kind of analogical reasoning that his book investigates. In most cases, it does this with remarkable success, furnishing the field of Victorian science and literature with some truly fresh inspiration and insight.
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Victorian StudiesIt is clarifying and invigorating to have a scholar as searching and well-read as Devin Griffiths address the problem of analogy head on. He ambitiously tracks analogy as an evolving mode of thought during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, focusing on analogy as a method central to the emerging field of comparative historicism . . .
The Age of Analogy is an impressive book that refuses to shy away from a topic as daunting as analogy just because it threatens to become unwieldy. Griffiths is unusually generous in the alacrity with which he maps the questions that interest him onto a huge range of scholarly fields, including linguistics, mathematics, publishing history, botany, comparative anatomy, astronomy, and musical theory.
—Anna Henchman, Boston University,
Victorian ReviewThe Age of Analogy brims with original arguments and demonstrates Griffiths's impressive range and dexterity in a wide variety of fields and discourses.
—Adam Sneed, Southwest Tennessee Community College,
Studies in RomanticismDevin Griffiths's excellent
The Age of Analogy: Science and Literature between the Darwins makes a compelling case for the importance of literary language to the development of scientific theory and practice . . . [
The Age of Analogy] demonstrates an encyclopedic grasp of everything from set theory to Saussurian semiotics . . . As Griffiths so masterfully demonstrates, analogy helps us extend our imaginative apprehension of the world's past and present—as well as its possible futures.
—Ella Mershon, Marquette University,
Modern PhilologyTable of ContentsIntroduction: Analogy under a Different Form
Prelude: Thinking through Analogy
1. Erasmus Darwin, Enlightenment History, and the Crisis of Analogy
2. Crossing the Border with Walter Scott
3. Spooky Action in Alfred Tennyson's In Memoriam A. H. H.
4. Falsifying George Eliot
5. The Origin of Charles Darwin's Orchids
Coda: Climate Science and the "No-Analog Future"
Notes
Bibliography
Index
