This book is advertised as a “rethinking of the European novel and its relationship to early evolutionary science./ The 120 years between Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749) and George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871) marked both the rise of the novel and the shift from the presumption of a stable, universal human nature to one that changes over time.” It is a strange choice to select a 1749 start-date for the novel’s rise, as Watt, who wrote the book on this “rise” that is frequently quoted, looked back to “Defoe’s” Crusoe (1719). My own theory and other critics have recently questioned this “rise” theory. Evolutionary theory has also changed from a steady march of progress to one the demonstrates that species intermingled and moved with randomness in stages, rather than constantly improving in a single direction over time. The use of “rise” in this summary suggests the author is going to prefer this century-plus-old conception. Despite using this outmoded perspective, Duncan promises to reorient “our understanding of the novel’s formation during its cultural ascendancy, arguing that fiction produced new knowledge in a period characterized by the interplay between literary and scientific discourses—even as the two were separating into distinct domains.” This is an example of drawing connections between things that lack clear logical links. “Duncan focuses on several crisis points: the contentious formation of a natural history of the human species in the late Enlightenment; the emergence of new genres such as the Romantic bildungsroman…” What does the youth-to-death central-character narrative plotline have to do with evolution? This book promises to digress into ponderings into whatever came into Duncan’s head. Then he attempts to address: “historical novels by Walter Scott and Victor Hugo that confronted the dissolution of the idea of a fixed human nature…” Who said there was a fixed human nature? When did Scott or Hugo digress into ponderings on it being changing? This all seems completely false and misleading. “Charles Dickens’s transformist aesthetic and its challenge to Victorian realism…” What? Dickens was a realist; and it is realistic that things change. He goes on: “George Eliot’s reckoning with the nineteenth-century revolutions in the human and natural sciences. Modeling the modern scientific conception of a developmental human nature, the novel became a major experimental instrument for managing the new set of divisions—between nature and history, individual and species, human and biological life—that replaced the ancient schism between animal body and immortal soul.” While digression is a sin, claiming that you have solved the world’s problems while thus digressing is a scholarly sin: “The first book to explore the interaction of European fiction with ‘the natural history of man’ from the late Enlightenment through the mid-Victorian era…” There have been countless books on evolution, the environment and natural history in general, of “the natural history of man” in particular. If Duncan has not read any of them before starting his own project, this is indeed problematic. Duncan is a Florence Green Bixby Chair in English at the University of California, Berkeley; this is his second book with Princeton University Press. While this cover is outstanding, just looking at this summary would have made me conclude it must be another Rowman book; Princeton’s titles are usually more polished and updated.
The section headings reinforce the strange turn this book takes: “The Faculty of Perfection”, “The Paragon of Animals”, “Infinity or Totality”, “Dark Unhappy Ones”: I think Duncan is just making fun of potential critics with these. He is just steering into total darkness. Two of the main chapters focus on two writers: Dickens and George Eliot, with a look at “science fiction” for the latter; Eliot does not come to mind when I ponder science fiction; it would have been appropriate for the subject for Duncan to examine early science fiction, but he avoids this in favor of stretching reality to fit his march-of-progress narrative.
The interior does not fair better: “Even when (or perhaps, especially when) not making racial difference its theme—it largely went without saying that Bildung, like property, was a white male privilege…” (17). This sentence is full of uncertainties and jumps between concepts before it arrives at a massive claim of racism sexism… Later, without offering proof of this assertion Duncan writes: “Modern criticism withheld from Hugo and Dickens the realist credentials it allowed Balzac…” Duncan goes on to argue that despite these earlier misjudgments Bleak House can indeed be read as an example of “nineteenth-century realism” (128). If he is only considering Watt’s “rise” theory and other anti-communist, racist, march-of-progress theorists than he is arriving at a unique conclusion here, but socialists have been claiming Dickens as a realist since some of the earlier criticisms of his fiction: he wrote a couple of novels on rebellion and revolution, so really seeing Dickens as an anti-realistic or as something other than a realist is just ridiculous.
It is emotionally exhausting to read scholarship with these types of mistakes in them at this stage of this massive set of reviews, so I will stop here.