Module Information

Week 1: Introduction. This is an introductory session focusing on selected chapters from the Origin and including some discussion of non-Darwinian evolutionary theories. The session will examine cultural responses to evolutionary theory in the nineteenth century and the social and religious questions that were raised by Darwin’s work.

Week 2: Poetry Before Darwin. This session will explore responses to pre-Darwinian evolutionary theories in poems from the 1850s and earlier. The poems under consideration will include works by Alfred Lord Tennyson and Arthur Hugh Clough.

Week 3: Faith and Doubt 1. This session will examine how poetry from the 1860s onwards responded to the Darwinian challenge to a Christian worldview. We will read a selection of shorter poems including Robert Browning’s ‘Caliban Upon Setebos’ and Gerard Manley Hopkins’s ‘That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrection’.

Week 4: Faith and Doubt 2. We will continue to explore the religious implications of Darwin’s work as we discuss James Thomson’s long poem ‘The City of Dreadful Night’.

Week 5: Change and Progress 1. This session will explore the appeal of evolutionary theory to progressive writers. We will examine the presence of pre-Darwinian evolutionary theories in ostensibly Darwinian poetry and the tension between the representation of random variation in Darwin’s work and the depictions of purposeful, progressive change in the work of poets who responded to his theories. We will focus on selected poems by poets including Algernon Charles Swinburne, L.S. Bevington, Emily Pfeiffer and A. Mary F. Robinson.

Week 6: Change and Progress 2. We will continue our exploration of Darwinian and non-Darwinian theories of change and of the implications of Darwin’s works for religion through our reading of Mathilde Blind’s 1889 volume The Ascent of Man.

Week 7: Evolution and the Position of Women. We will examine feminist responses to evolution in poems including ‘She Who is to Come’ by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and ‘Woman’s Future’ by May Kendall. We will also look at less overt allusions to the position of women in evolutionary poems including Gilman’s ‘Similar Cases’ and Kendall’s ‘The Lower Life’. Contextual material will include extracts from non-fiction works by Olive Schreiner, Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Antoinette Brown Blackwell.

Week 8: Comedy and Nonsense. This session will examine comic responses to the evolutionary blurring of species boundaries and will explore the role of humour in cultural responses to evolution. Poems will include May Kendall’s ‘Lay of the Trilobite’ and nonsense poetry by Edward Lear. Contextual material will include illustrations and cartoons from Punch Magazine.

Week 9: Sexual Selection. We will examine the use of the imagery of Darwinian sexual selection in late-Victorian love poetry including George Meredith’s Modern Love sequence, Constance Naden’s ‘Evolutional Erotics’ sequence and Mathilde Blind’s ‘Song of the Willi’.

Week 10: Evolutionary Poetry in the Twentieth Century. This session will explore a selection of twentieth-century poems by poets including H.D., Edna St Vincent Millay and Amy Clampitt to examine the aspects of Darwinism that have continued to resonate with poets beyond Darwin’s own era. Through this focus on the persistence of some themes and the divergence of others we will sum up the module and draw larger conclusions about the nature and purpose of Darwinian poetry.