'Clint Machann's book is a work of mature scholarship and fresh vision. Machann combines an informed understanding of human universals with historicist insights into the culturally conditioned construction of sexual identities. As perhaps the first critic of Victorian poetry to have assimilated contemporary evolutionary psychology, Machann offers something genuinely new to his field. After reading Machann, we understand these poems better. That surely is one of the chief aims of all literary scholarship.' Joseph Carroll, University of Missouri, St. Louis, USA '... thoughtfully reckons with the accusations levelled at literary Darwinism. In reviving interest in the cohesive impulses of Victorian poetry, and in the study of what is "essential" about us rather than culturally-constructed, this book makes an important contribution to Victorian literary studies.' nbol-19