Age of Analogy

Devin Griffiths, a former biologist who studied artificial evolution, is an assistant professor of English at the University of Southern California.

• Introduction1. Science, Literature, and History2. The New Historicism3. Thinking through Analogy4. Implications for Comparative Historicism5. Summary of ChaptersPrelude: Thinking Through Analogy1. Analogy vs. Comparison2. Harmonic vs. Formal Analogy3. Analogy and the "swerve around the literary"4. The Sign of AnalogyChapter 1: Erasmus Darwin, Enlightenment History, and the Crisis of AnalogyI. The Loves of the Plants and Sexual Taxonomy2. Stadial History and The Botanic Garden3. The "Fertilization of Egypt" and the Flattening of Allegory4. Expulsion from the Garden: Zoonomia and Darwin's Fall from GraceConclusion: "Philosophical Arguments of the Last Generation"Chapter 2: Crossing the Border with Walter Scott1. The Subject of Enlightenment History2. The Forensic Antiquary3. Faking the Minstrelsy4. Linguistic Anthropology in Ivanhoe and Waverley Conclusion: "So Leyden were alive"Chapter 3: Incorporate History in Alfred Tennyson's In Memoriam A. H. H.1. Analogical Verses2. Hallam's Perfect Danae3. The Logic of Analogy and the Plurality of Worlds4. Comparative Anatomy and the ArchetypeConclusion: The Higher TypeChapter 4: George Eliot and False History1. The Westminster Review and the "historic imagination"2. The "Higher Criticism" and the Natural History of Social Life3. Rosamond's Harmonic Sympathy4. The Entangled Word: Eliot's Essays and the Problem of Organic FormConclusion: Origins and Historiographic FormChapter 5: The Origin of Darwin's Orchids and the Intent of Comparative History1. A Comparative Natural History: The Analogy Notebooks 2. Curating Analogy in On the Origin of Species3. "A working collection of books": Darwin and the Novels4. Orchids in Action5. Flat TheologyConclusion: Epitaphs for DarwinCoda: Climate Science and The "No-Analog Future"NotesBibliographyIndex

This is a serious, detailed, and convincing account with few unexplored avenues... Recommended. All academic levels/libraries. Choice Recommended. Choice The Age of Analogy represents a valuable contribution to scholarship on literature and science. Building on the established models of new historicism and of Gillian Beer's foundational work on Darwinism, it nonetheless offers something new by asking researchers in this field to think more carefully about the kinds of historicism that operate both in their own work and in nineteenth-century literary and scientific writing Review of English Studies For those interested in either of the intertwined histories of literature and science -- or in what we might more generously call the intellectual culture of the 1780s through the 1850s -- Griffiths' book is both readable and richly rewarding. Review 19 This ambitious work should shape future thinking about historicism, science and literature in the nineteenth century and beyond in new and significant ways. Griffiths deserves to be congratulated on having achieved this and, in the process, on having written some of the best recent criticism on Charles Darwin and George Eliot in particular, which is no mean feat in itself. British Society for Literature and Science