Darwinian Myths The Legends And Misuses Of A Theory
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Darwinian Myths
Author: Edward Caudill
language: en
Publisher: Univ. of Tennessee Press
Release Date: 2005-05-30
In Darwinian Myths, Edward Caudill examines the ability of Darwin's theory to inspire legends, focusing particularly on the impact of social Darwinism on popular culture. This compelling testimony to the power of myth shows the ways in which, over the years, Darwin's ideas--twisted, truncated, and misapplied--have been appropriated by individuals, governments, and cultural elites to lend credibility to xenophobic, racist, and imperialist political movements and policies. Caudill uses newspaper and magazine accounts and correspondence to trace the myth-making and promotional efforts of Darwin himself, as well as the transformation of his empirically based theory into the philosophy of social Darwinism.
Soldiers of Fortune
Author: Richard Harding Davis
language: en
Publisher: Broadview Press
Release Date: 2006-06-02
A romance of America's nascent imperial power, Richard Harding Davis's Soldiers of Fortune recounts the adventures of Robert Clay, a mining engineer and sometime mercenary, and Hope Langham, the daughter of a wealthy American industrialist, as they become caught up in a coup in Olancho, a fictional Latin American republic. When the coup, organized by corrupt politicians and generals, threatens the American-owned Valencia Mining Company, Clay organizes his workers and the handful of Americans visiting the mine into a counter-coup force. Written on the eve of the Spanish-American War, Soldiers of Fortune casts the young American as the dashing, hypermasculine hero of the new military and economic imperium. A huge best-seller, the novel did its part to push the nation into war against Spain, and stands as one of the most important texts in the literature of American imperialism. The appendices, which bring together primary materials by writers and politicians such as Rebecca Harding Davis, Theodore Roosevelt, Jose Martí, Mark Twain, Herbert Spencer, and others, address such issues as social Darwinism, masculinity, and ideas of Anglo-American superiority.
Darwin the Writer
Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, arguably the most important book written in English in the nineteenth century, transformed the way we looked at the world. It is usually assumed that this is because the idea of evolution was so staggeringly powerful. Prize-winning author George Levine suggests that much of its influence was due, in fact, to its artistry; to the way it was written. Alive with metaphor, vivid descriptions, twists, hesitations, personal exclamations, and humour, the prose is imbued with the sorts of tensions, ambivalences, and feelings characteristic of great literature. Although it is certainly a work of "science," the Origin is equally a work of "literature," at home in the company of celebrated Victorian novels such as Middlemarch and Bleak House, books that give us a unique yet recognisable sense of what the world is really like, while not being literally 'true'. Darwin's enormous cultural success, Levine contends, depended as much on the construction of his argument and the nature of his language, as it did on the power of his ideas and his evidence. By challenging the dominant reading of his work, this impassioned and energetic book gives us a Darwin who is comic rather than tragic, ebullient rather than austere, and who takes delight in the wild and fluid entanglement of things.