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"The 16 essays in this collection explore the distinctive qualities of America's textual engagement with Darwinism--the ways in which Darwinian language and theories have made their way into American Literary and cultural texts, providing writers a new vocabulary to describe human affairs and interactions with other living organisms. The editors argue that attention to the specifics of Darwin's place in the American scene is vital in light of the particularities of the reception and uses of evolutionary theory in the U.S.--i.e. the nation's melting pot identity, its slave past, its particular brands of social Darwinism, and its school of Pragmatist philosophy. In her review of the proposal, Laura Dassow Walls pointed out that one of the most exciting aspects of this project is that the editors and authors are reading a wide range of Darwin's own texts and thereby recovering the Darwin that Americans actually encountered, the more subtle and challenging Darwin who energized modernist American literature, not the Social Darwinist constructed by Herbert Spencer"-- "While much has been written about the impact of Darwin's theories on U.S. culture, and countless scholarly collections have been devoted to the science of evolution, few have addressed the specific details of Darwin's theories as a cultural force affecting U.S. writers. America's Darwin fills this gap and features a range of critical approaches that examine U.S. textual responses to Darwin's works.The scholars in this collection represent a range of disciplines--literature, history of science, women's studies, geology, biology, entomology, and anthropology. All pay close attention to the specific forms that Darwinian evolution took in the United States, engaging not only with Darwin's most famous works, such as On the Origin of Species, but also with less familiar works, such as The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. Each contributor considers distinctive social, cultural, and intellectual conditions that affected the reception and dissemination of evolutionary thought, from before the publication of On the Origin of Species to the early years of the twenty-first century. These essays engage with the specific details and language of a wide selection of Darwin's texts, treating his writings as primary sources essential to comprehending the impact of Darwinian language on American writers and thinkers. This careful engagement with the texts of evolution enables us to see the broad points of its acceptance and adoption in the American scene; this approach also highlights the ways in which writers, reformers, and others reconfigured Darwinian language to suit their individual purposes. America's Darwin demonstrates the many ways in which writers and others fit themselves to a narrative of evolution whose dominant motifs are contingency and uncertainty. Collectively, the authors make the compelling case that the interpretation of evolutionary theory in the U.S. has always shifted in relation to prevailing cultural anxieties"--
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