Offering provocative readings of Tennyson's Idylls of the King, Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh, Clough's Amours de Voyage, and Browning's The Ring and the Book, Clinton Machann employs the methods of literary Darwinism to shed light on the important issue of masculinity in the Victorian epic. Machann's central argument is that the drives and tendencies of human nature, as well as a writer's specific historical and cultural context, are important for understanding the Victorian long poem
