Reflects contemporary paradigm shifts in embryology and evolutionary
theory through formal experimentation in the modernist Bildungsroman
Modernist Life Histories explores how new models of embryonic
development helped inspire new kinds of coming-of-age plots during the
first half of the twentieth century. Focusing on novels by E. M.
Forster, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Aldous Huxley and Samuel Beckett,
the book links narrative experiments with shuffled chronology, repeated
beginnings and sex change to new discoveries in the biological sciences.
It also reveals new connections between the so-called Two Cultures by
highlighting how scientific ideas and narratives enter the literary
realm.
Key Features
- Provides a unique perspective on the Bildungsroman (novel of
formation), one of the most discussed genres in recent scholarly work
on modernism
- Approaches the study of science and literature with exceptionally
close attention to the details of scientific models, their cultural
appropriations, and their political implications
- Makes the first thoroughgoing argument for twentieth-century biology
as a positive influence on modernist poetics and ethics
- Models how narrative theory can serve the goals of interdisciplinary
research