Conclusion

Abstract

The brief conclusion charts some of the ways in which fiction continues to engage with contemporary biology after 1960—as Simon Mawer’s Mendel’s Dwarf and Ali Smith’s How to be both do with molecular genetics, Zadie Smith’s White Teeth and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go with cloning, and Anthony Burgess’s The Wanting Seed and Ian McEwan’s Nutshell with evolutionary genetics. Linking modernist to contemporary Bildungsromane, I propose that using biological models to dissociate development from chronology is not only a narratological practice but also an ethical and political one. Investigating how biology participated in the modernist search for an expanded understanding of development, Modernist Life Histories positions itself within a multidisciplinary attempt to negotiate the condition of “alternative” or “multiple modernities.”