America's Darwin

"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."--