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Full Description
What does heredity mean for identity? What role does the individual have in shaping a personal or a human history? What is the ethical status of seemingly biologically determined behaviours? What does individual death mean in the light of species extinction? Autobiologies explores the importance of such questions in Victorian life writing. Analysing memoirs, diaries, letters, and natural histories Alexis Harley demonstrates how theories of natural selection shaped nineteenth-century autobiographical practices and refashioned the human subject—and also how the lived experience of the individual theorist simultaneously impacted their biological formulations.
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction: Darwinian Selves
Part I: Darwin
Chapter 1: Darwin's Family
Chapter 2: Naturalist Self-Fashioning: Darwin and the Beagle Diary
Chapter 3: Animal Darwin and the Sympathy Instinct ... 93
Part II: Variations
Chapter 4: Theories of Self-Transformation
Chapter 5: "A natural history of myself": Herbert Spencer's Individuation
Chapter 6: Harriet Martineau's Autothanatography and the Comtean Self
Part III: Autobiologies
Chapter 7: De Profundis, Degeneration and Wilde's Spencerian Individualism
Chapter 8: Father and Son: Darwinism and the Struggle of Two Temperaments
Chapter 9: In Memoriam and the Consolations of Development
Conclusion: After the Victorians
Bibliography
Index
About the Author
