David Amigoni is Professor of Victorian Literature at Keele University

The concept of culture, now such an important term within both the arts and the sciences, is a legacy of the nineteenth century. By closely analysing writings by evolutionary scienctists as Charles Darwin, Alfred Russel Wallace and Herbert Spencer, alongside those of literary figures including Wordsworth, Coleridge, Arnold, Butler and Gosse, David Amigoni shows how the modern concept of "culture" developed out of the interdisciplinary interactions between literature, philosophy, anthropology, colonialism, and, in particular, Darwin's theories of evolution. He goes on to explore the relationship between literature and evolutionary science by arguing that culture was seen less as a singular idea or concept, and more as a field  of debate and conflict. This timely and highly original book includes much new material on the history of evolutionary thought and its cultural impact, and will be of interest to scholars of intellectual and scientific history as well as of literature.


Cambridge University Press,
2007