Sexual Selection and the American Novel
In the middle and late 1990s when I was pursuing a PhD in English, my fixed interest in evolution and human behavior was so outré that I quickly learned to avoid mentioning it to my peers and professors. My intellectual isolation was made bearable only by the new prevalence of email, which allowed me to hook up with kindred heretics around the world, and by a small handful of relatively obscure but thoroughly Darwinian works of literary scholarship. I learned much from Robert Storey's Mimesis and the Human Animal: On the Biogenetic Foundations of Literary Representation (Northwestern 1996) and from Joseph Carroll's landmark Evolution and Literary Theory (Missouri 1994), which combined a cruelly honed polemic against postmodernism with an inspiring call to situate literary scholarship within the emerging evolutionary paradigm. Though it lacked the revolutionary energy of Storey's and Carroll's offerings (Storey goes so far as to call Foucault an “ass†for his argument that man is a “recent invention†of the last several centuries, p. 59), I also took interest in Bert Bender's The Descent of Love: Darwin and the Theory of Sexual Selection in American Fiction, 1871-1926 (Pennsylvania 1996). Bender documented the ways that late 19th century and early 20th century American novelists struggled to come to grips with the new Darwinian worldview, especially with the implications of the theory of sexual selection.
Beyond these books and some scattered journal articles there was little in the world of contemporary literary scholarship that managed both to approach the Darwinian perspective on human behavior and psychology in an ideologically neutral way and to meaningfully incorporate some of its insights.
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