American Romanticism and the Evolutionary Idea

Evolutionary thought transformed nineteenth-century American intellectual life. This book details how it shaped literature in the middle decades of the century and intersected with Romantic conceptions of selfhood, society, and the history of life. Jennifer J. Baker reads the era's Romanticism in relation to Darwin as well as naturalists, embryologists, ethnologists, anthropologists, and even Biblical creationists who used evolutionary frameworks to understand the past and future. The "evol...