Human FormsPub Date : 2019-09-03DOI: 10.2307/j.ctvdf0jb9.5
I. Duncan
{"title":"The Form of Man","authors":"I. Duncan","doi":"10.2307/j.ctvdf0jb9.5","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvdf0jb9.5","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter examines how the science of man became the natural history of man, a history not of individuals or nations but of the human species. A new biological conception of species “as an entity distributed in time and space,” released from the synchronic grid of Linnaean taxonomy as well as from a providential cosmology, comprised what Philip Sloan has called the “Buffonian revolution.” That revolution would be as consequential for literary genres, especially the novel, as it was for the natural and human sciences, in part due to Buffon's recourse to a literary style and techniques of “speculative thought experiment,” probabilistic reasoning, “analogical reasoning, and divination” in his scientific method. The chapter then looks at the debate over the history of man that broke out in the mid-1780s between Immanuel Kant and Gottfried Herder. One of the great intellectual quarrels of the late Enlightenment, it signposted the forking paths of Kant's critical philosophy, on the one hand, and the scientific project of natural history on the other.","PeriodicalId":197549,"journal":{"name":"Human Forms","volume":"5 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123931101","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Human FormsPub Date : 2019-09-03DOI: 10.2307/j.ctvdf0jb9.7
I. Duncan
{"title":"Lamarckian Historical Romance","authors":"I. Duncan","doi":"10.2307/j.ctvdf0jb9.7","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvdf0jb9.7","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter addresses how the politics of the revolutionary era charged the intellectual debates and institutional rivalries that were agitating the emergent science of the forms of life, centered now in Paris. Arguing for the reform of knowledge as a necessary condition of political reform, scientific authors opposed to the Bourbon regime rallied around Lamarckism, and transformist natural history more broadly, throughout the 1820s. Jean-Baptiste Lamarck's protégé Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, emerging as a leading light of the liberal movement, made monstrosity a key research program of the new philosophical anatomy. Geoffroy sought to reaffirm the orderliness of nature by insisting that monstrosities were natural phenomena, subject to natural law-deviations, on classifiable principles, from the archetypal regularity of the species, itself subject to the grand law of “unity of organic composition.” At the same time, monstrosity provided a mechanism for the transformation of species. The chapter then looks at examples of historical fiction and romances that feature powers beyond human nature, such as Victor Hugo's Notre-Dame de Paris.","PeriodicalId":197549,"journal":{"name":"Human Forms","volume":"35 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122392055","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Human FormsPub Date : 2019-09-03DOI: 10.2307/j.ctvdf0jb9.6
I. Duncan
{"title":"The Form of the Novel","authors":"I. Duncan","doi":"10.2307/j.ctvdf0jb9.6","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvdf0jb9.6","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter assesses Germaine de Staël's reckoning with the “new genres or sub-genres characteristic of realism,” the Bildungsroman and its British analogues, the Anglo-Irish national tale and Scottish historical novel, formed in the “novelistic revolution” of European Romanticism. Modeling the scientific conception of human nature as a developmental entity or emergent phenomenon, these new genres or subgenres rehearse a universal formation of species being—a Bildung der Humanität—through the ontogenetic narrative of subject formation. Staël's broad target is the structural exclusion of women from the category that underwrites the new forms of the novel: the Enlightenment's grand universal particular, “man.” And yet, excluded from the new conception of humanity, women were most fully expressive of it. Where men are fixed in a social taxonomy, like animals in the system of nature, women possess the plasticity and fluidity, the capacity to move up and down the scale of being, that are specific markers of the human in late Enlightenment anthropology.","PeriodicalId":197549,"journal":{"name":"Human Forms","volume":"228 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"117291976","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Human FormsPub Date : 2014-02-01DOI: 10.1525/REP.2014.125.1.15
I. Duncan
{"title":"George Eliot’s Science Fiction","authors":"I. Duncan","doi":"10.1525/REP.2014.125.1.15","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/REP.2014.125.1.15","url":null,"abstract":"This concluding chapter focuses on George Eliot's Middlemarch. The main business of Middlemarch, formulated as the premise of its opening rhetorical question, is with a scientific project, “the history of man.” While George Eliot's literary career coincided with Charles Darwin's, she did not immediately digest his theory; her fiction activates other developmental forces besides natural selection, and deranges the scientific thought it brings into play. In doing so, it churns up the not-yet-settled, volatile currents of that scientific thought-including Darwin's, who was not always (himself) a pure Darwinist. With that, it deranges its own aesthetic protocols, so often read as an Olympian consummation of Victorian realism. “To a degree that the catchall term 'realism' obscures,” writes Lauren Goodlad, “Eliot's oeuvre is generically diverse, bold, and experimental.” The chapter seeks to recapture the unsettling force of that experimentalism: to make George Eliot strange again.","PeriodicalId":197549,"journal":{"name":"Human Forms","volume":"131 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134499340","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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