Evolution and Victorian Culture

Bernard V. Lightman is Professor of Humanities at York University, Toronto, where he is Director of the Institute for Science and Technology Studies. He is also the Editor of the History of Science Society's flagship journal, Isis. His latest publications include Evolutionary Naturalism in Victorian Britain (2009), Victorian Popularizers of Science (2007) and Science in the Marketplace (2007, co-edited with Aileen Fyfe). Bennett Zon is Professor of Music at Durham University, where he is also Director of the Centre for Nineteenth-Century Music. He has published articles, dictionary and encyclopaedia entries, reviews and edited volumes, as well as monographs including Representing Non-Western Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain (2007), Music and Metaphor in Nineteenth-Century British Musicology (2000) and The English Plainchant Revival (1999).

'[The editors] rearticulate one of our most persistent discussions in a provocative new light … [this book] will be useful on the shelf of anybody who cares about the complex fabric of evolution and the ways in which we attempt to understand it.' Will Tattersdill, The British Society for Literature and Science (bsls.ac.uk)

• Introduction Bernard V. Lightman and Bennett Zon; 1. Evolution and Victorian fiction Cannon Schmitt; 2. Poetry John Holmes; 3. Between specimen and imagination Elizabeth Edwards; 4. Early cinema and evolution Oliver Gaycken; 5. Evolution and Victorian arts Barbara Larson; 6. 'I'm evolving!': varieties of evolution on the Victorian stage Kirsten E. Shepherd-Barr; 7. Dance and evolutionary thought in late Victorian discourse Theresa Jill Buckland; 8. The 'non-Darwinian' revolution and the Great Chain of Musical Being Bennett Zon; 9. Development and display: progressive evolution in British Victorian architecture and architectural theory Carla Yanni; 10. Dramas of development: exhibitions and evolution in Victorian Britain Sadiah Qureshi; 11. The popularization of evolution and Victorian culture Bernard V. Lightman.