Amanda Mordavsky Caleb, Review of Carolyn Burdett’s ‘Sexual Selection, Automata and Ethics in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss and Olive Schreiner’s Undine and From Man to Man’

摘要

Studies of science and literature continually return to George Eliot's works as primary examples of the intersection between Darwin's view of evolution and Victorian literature. Analysis of Eliot's work appear in some of the most important texts in literature and science studies, most notably Gillian Beer's seminal work Darwin's Plots (1983) and Sally Shuttleworth's George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Science (1984). It is difficult to find new ways to approach a text like The Mill on the Floss through the lens of Darwinian theory, yet Carolyn Burdett manages to do just that by moving away from just a Darwinian reading of the novel, and instead incorporating contemporary theories of automata (most notably T.H. Huxley's work) as a bridge between Eliot and Olive Schreiner