000 02419nam a22002417a 4500
999 _c55465
_d55465
005 20191210113529.0
008 191001b ||||| |||| 00| 0 eng d
020 _a9780521128858
028 _aVariety Books Publishers Distributors
_b;B-10,Street No-02,West Vinod Nagar ,Delhi-110092
_c;IM2596
_d;25/09/2019
082 _a820.9353 DAW
100 _aGowan Dawson
245 _aDarwin, literature and Victorian respectability
_c/Gowan Dawson
260 _aCambridge ; New York
_b: Cambridge University Press
_c, 2007.
300 _axii, 282 pages
_b: illustrations
_c; 24 cm
365 _b2164
490 _aCambridge studies in nineteenth-century literature and culture, 57.
505 _a 1. Introduction : Darwinian science and Victorian respectability -- 2. Charles Darwin, Algernon Charles Swinburne and sexualized responses to evolution -- 3. John Tyndall, Walter Pater and the nineteenth-century revival of paganism -- 4. Darwinism, Victorian freethought and the Obscene Publications Act -- 5. The refashioning of William Kingdon Clifford's posthumous reputation -- 6. T.H. Huxley, Henry Maudsley and the pathologization of aestheticism
520 _a The success of Charles Darwin's evolutionary theories in mid-nineteenth-century Britain has long been attributed, in part, to his own adherence to strict standards of Victorian respectability, especially in regard to sex. Gowan Dawson contends that the fashioning of such respectability was by no means straightforward or unproblematic, with Darwin and his principal supporters facing surprisingly numerous and enduring accusations of encouraging sexual impropriety. Integrating contextual approaches to the history of science with recent work in literary studies, Dawson sheds new light on the well-known debates over evolution by examining them in relation to the murky underworlds of Victorian pornography, sexual innuendo, unrespectable freethought and artistic sensualism. Such disreputable and generally overlooked aspects of nineteenth-century culture were actually remarkably central to many of these controversies. Focusing particularly on aesthetic literature and new legal definitions of obscenity, Dawson reveals the underlying tensions between Darwin's theories and conventional notions of Victorian respectability.
650 _aEnglish literature
655 _aLiterature and science
700 _aGowan Dawson
942 _cBOOK