Literature Compass 13/10 (2016): 587–596, 10.1111/lic3.12344 Romantic Evolutions: Introduction Joshua D. Lambier* Western University Abstract Though the Romantic era is often imagined as the “age of revolution,” recent criticism in the field has seen renewed interest in Romanticism’s relationship to evolution, including the resurgence of such topics as organicism, vitalism, natural history, and natural philosophy, as well as other salient themes from the physical and life sciences. This essay offers a contextual introduction for a cluster of articles around the topic of evolution as a concept for literary theory and criticism in Romantic studies, articles that focus critical attention on complex evolutionary ideas like contingency, chance, species transformation, monstrosity, extinction, and the inhuman. The aim of Romantic Evolutions is to reimagine prevailing notions of evolution by tracing their modern origins to literary, cultural, and scientific discourses of the transitional period 1775–1859, a time that witnessed the genesis of the modern idea of “literature” alongside of the emergence of specialized disciplines, such as geology, biology, physiology, chemistry, psychology, and anthropology. Instead of searching through 18th- and early 19th-century science for “forerunners” to the Darwinian revolution, the essays in the volume focus attention on the important contributions of Romantic poets, philosophers, and scientists who have too often been overlooked by the empirical sciences. And yet, by shifting the central focus away from Darwin and his theory of natural selection, contributors also revisit his relationship to Romanticism with fresh eyes. Taken together, the volume seeks to provoke a reevaluation of our current understanding of the Romantic conception of evolution, one that will open new critical perspectives and orientations for scholars within and beyond the field. In keeping with Literature Compass’ unique mandate to publish articles that present new directions for literary research and challenge prevailing disciplinary orthodoxies, Romantic Evolutions seeks to present the outline of an emerging evolutionary paradigm in Romantic studies, one that has been obscured by the period’s traditional focus on revolution. This is not to dismiss the formative role of the American and French Revolutions for the birth of Romanticism, nor is it to propose an either/or distinction between revolution and evolution as organizational concepts for our understanding of the philosophic, scientific, and cultural debates of the period. Rather the essays in the volume focus scholarly attention on the under-investigated history of discoveries of Romantic science, with particular emphasis on theories of evolution that precede, and in some cases follow, Darwin’s controversial yet pivotal publication of The Origin of Species in 1859. Against the grain of many previous studies of evolution before Darwin, these essays do not simply look back at 18th and 19th-century science to identify precursors or adversaries on the road to the prevailing Darwinian theory of evolution by natural selection but instead reconsider the important contributions of Romantic era poets, philosophers, and scientists whose conceptions of nature have often been overlooked by the empirical sciences. And yet, by shifting the centre of gravity away from Darwin, we also revisit his relationship to Romanticism with new perspective. Indeed for many historians of science, as Robert J. Richards observes, there is a general presumption that Darwin is “the very antithesis of the Romantic,” which has hitherto concealed “the Romantic conception of nature that underlay his theory of evolution” (514–15). Literary historians, too, have often distanced Darwin from © 2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 588 Romantic Evolutions Romantic and Idealist philosophies of nature. Hans Eichner, for example, argues that the mechanistic basis of Darwin’s scientific thought is so radically different from the speculative metaphysics of a Naturphilosopher like Schelling “that it is difficult to imagine them carrying on an intelligent conversation” (24–25). Relying on the familiar supposition that teleological explanations of life are only way stations along the journey towards mechanistic principles of authoritative science, Eichner, like so many before and after him, drives a wedge between Romanticism and the ethos of modern science. “Schelling’s evolutionary hypothesis derives of course from pure speculation and involves unverifiable teleological assumptions,” Eichner proposes, “while Darwin’s theory of evolution rests on empirical facts and involves a mechanism of natural selection that would have delighted scientists like Harvey and Boyle” (24). Though it is certainly the case that Romantic natural philosophy championed vitalistic and teleological approaches to the natural sciences, principles that Darwin would often challenge in the works of his English contemporaries, these earlier systems were also exploring complex evolutionary concepts of contingency, chance, monstrosity, and extinction. With fresh eyes, we see that Darwin was always already in conversation with Romantic science, whether we find these encounters in his early readings of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley, or his careful study of the works of Alexander von Humboldt, Goethe, and his grandfather Erasmus. His early readings of Romantic literature, as Gillian Beer has recently pointed out, helped attune Darwin’s scientific imagination to an appreciation of the aesthetic experience of nature, both in its sublime and mundane manifestations, which in turn inform his creative use of metaphor and analogy to reveal similitudes and affinities in the otherwise chaotic particulars of the natural world.1 Given the recent interest in the physical and life sciences in Romantic studies,2 and given the surging number of investigations on evolution as a concept for literary theory and criticism,3 it is perhaps surprising that so few studies have specifically taken up Romanticism’s relationship to evolution. There is certainly a significant body of interdisciplinary work on Victorian-era debates over the cultural, literary, and religious consequences of the concept of evolution,4 especially in light of Darwin’s scientific theory of the origin of species and its implication for prominent thinkers like Alfred Russel Wallace, T.H. Huxley, and Herbert Spencer, or writers like Dickens, Hardy, and Eliot. But as Hermione de Almeida argues, “no such comparable inquiry or sustained interest exists for the romantic era and its literature,” nor are there “broadly disciplinary studies connecting evolutionary issues shared between the two periods that romantic literary scholars may draw upon” (131). This volume aims to provoke such a reimagination of our current understanding of the Romantic conception of evolution, one that will open new critical perspectives and orientations for scholars of the 18th and 19th centuries across the disciplines. The essays invite us to reconsider a diverse range of topics in the study of evolution at various points of intersection between literary, cultural and scientific discourses, such as the emergence of troubling concepts of the inorganic, the inhuman, and extinction; the creation of novel modes of representing chance, change and transformation in the natural world; the rich, complex poetic responses to plants and animals; the evolving idea of collections and museums of the period; and the imaginative reconfiguration of prevailing notions of historical time in light of the discoveries of the new sciences of geology and paleontology. One of the notable culprits for the critical neglect of Romantic evolution, of course, lies in the general suspicion towards theories of organicism in literary studies, both in its 19th- and 20th-century configurations, particularly in the case of the New Critics who expunged the biological roots of the organic metaphor and retained only the aesthetic logic of unifying each of a work’s disparate parts within the self-enclosed structure of the whole. The principles of organic unity and form implied by the metaphor of the organism offered the critic, like a literary botanist, a methodology for putting the work under the microscope to dissect its various constituent parts, to determine how each of these parts relates to the others and the whole, © 2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd Literature Compass 13/10 (2016): 587–596, 10.1111/lic3.12344 Romantic Evolutions 589 and then to make an aesthetic judgment to discern how perfectly adapted the parts are to the completed design of the work. Responding to the question of “whether the poem itself, the hypostatized verbal and mental act, looks in any way like an animal or a vegetable” (69), William K. Wimsatt warns against overly literal interpretations of the metaphor. Indeed, if the analogy of the physical organism is taken too far toward what he calls “the extreme biological analogy” (78), one runs the risk of ascribing unruly biological traits to the poetic organism, like growth, reproduction, disease, and self-transformation. Wimsatt is also concerned to bracket what he identifies as fallacious intentional evaluations of the literary object, which, he argues, intrude upon the integral structure of the work and introduce “a measure of geneticism or psychological doctrine concerning the author’s consciousness or unconsciousness” (68). By doing so, he demonstrates how the New Critical attempt to maintain the autonomy of the poetic domain against the incursion of foreign elements, including critical approaches that import “economic, sociological, or other historical categories” (71), in a way echoes the conventional scientific imperative to remove contamination from the sterile conditions of the analytic process. In their desire to approximate objective conditions for the analysis of the “hypostatized” literary object, the New Critics’ program for a specialized and professionalized form of organic criticism ultimately suppressed the very vital forces that animate organismic life, unsettling forces that threaten to break apart their carefully curated concept of organic unity. Even where their work engages with disruptive figures, such as paradox and irony, the aim is typically to arrive at a harmonized balance of oppositions within the structure of the well-wrought urn. If we return to the genesis of the organicist tradition in Romanticism, however, we are awestruck by the multidisciplinary range of material that writers were drawing upon to construct their interrelated theories of poetry and science. Their bold speculations into the forms and forces of life make us realize, and perhaps lament, what we have lost by suppressing the energy of earlier organismic theories over the fear that their epistemological foundations might be, to recall G.N. G. Orsini’s cautionary words, “tainted with a reference to biological phenomena” (28). This return to Romantic science should provoke a reconsideration of the exchange between nature and culture, with an eye to the complex ways in which the study of life, in all its variation and diversity, can inform our understanding of the transformations of literary and artistic forms. We also turn back to investigate the explosion of scientific discoveries in the emerging disciplines of biology, chemistry, comparative anatomy and geology. These breakthroughs were made possible by the development of novel experimental methods to utilize the power of electricity and magnetism; by the growing number and variety of botanical collections and natural history museums; and by the use of more systematic methods for studying rocks, minerals, and fossils. Those who practiced the sciences were also changing the institutional landscape of scientific inquiry. In the British context, for example, professors and savants of these new disciplines began to establish their own unique societies – the germinal form of what we now conceive of as the academic society – such as the Linnean Society (1788), the Geological Society (1807), the Astronomical Society (1820), and the British Association for the Advancement of Science (1831). Romantic science, as Richard Holmes argues, also invented the idea of “popular science, a people’s science,” with its “new commitment to explain, to educate, to communicate to a general public” (xix), a mandate that took the form of public lectures, experimental demonstrations, textbooks, scientific journals, and debates on hotly contested questions like the vitalism controversy. Poets and thinkers of the period were deeply engaged participants in this culture of exploration as well and frequently drew upon the discoveries of scientific experimentation and natural philosophy to compose poetic works that introduced a new vision of the evolving and changing world. And as these new theories of life circulated further beyond the mysterious space of the laboratory, the imagination of the public was, to use Wordsworth’s words in The Excursion, “taught with patient interest to watch / The processes of things” (4. 1257–58). © 2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd Literature Compass 13/10 (2016): 587–596, 10.1111/lic3.12344 590 Romantic Evolutions In the midst of this deluge of new knowledge, both speculative and experimental, there was amongst the Romantic thinkers a feverish drive to develop a theory of life that could bring a degree of systematicity to the sciences, but without reducing the organismic world to mechanical causes. In opposition to the materialistic principles of the prevailing mechanistic ideology, Coleridge proposes that life is more than the sum total of the parts and functions that constitute the body’s physical organization. Forms of life, for Coleridge, are animated by “the principle of unity in multeity” (42), or rather, a principle of internal purposiveness that activates and regulates bodies from within according to the structure of the whole. “I define life,” he writes, “as the principle of individuation, or the power which unites a given all into a whole that is presupposed by all its parts” (42). His conception of organic form derives, as is well known, from his study of Kant’s aesthetic and natural philosophy, specifically in the Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790), which sets the groundwork for the Romantic conception of the natural world. This is not only the case for Coleridge but also German Romantics and Idealists like Schelling, Hegel, Novalis, and the Schlegel brothers. And in light of this critical debt, we ought here to recall the basic tenets of Kant’s organicism to help us make sense of the wider implications of this mode of thought, and to evaluate the legacies, remainders, and departures from the organic tradition. In §65 of the third Critique, Kant outlines his inf luential idea that nature is not a “motive power” that creates machine-like objects (a watch, for example), but rather a “formative power” whose organized products are in fact “natural ends” (Naturzwecke) (246). To be a natural end, Kant proposes, an organized being must possess a form of causality that is unique to life: it must, for instance, be self-generating such that it is both cause and effect of itself; it must also be self-organizing such that each of the parts is reciprocally related to each other and to the idea of the whole; and, finally, it must possess a systematic unity such that the form and combination of the parts is guided by the internally purposive design of the whole. Taken together, products of nature have a singular form of organization that is “not analogous with any causality that we know” (246). It is, in this sense, an autopoietic causality unique to life, which makes it difficult for the scientist to penetrate into the deeper mysteries of life – especially if this involves the attempt to reduce living objects to fundamental laws of mechanics, as Newton had tried to do for the study of celestial bodies in physics. To illustrate the challenge for the Romantic biologist, Kant famously argues that it would be misguided for scientific investigation “to hope that there may yet arise a Newton who could make comprehensible even the generation of a blade of grass according to natural laws that no intention has ordered” (271). He is certainly not overlooking the important place of empirical observation and mechanical explanations in the natural sciences. Nor is he foreclosing on all hopes at a comprehensive theory of life. Rather, he wants to propose a critical approach to the investigation of organic nature that would avoid the dangers of making overly bold claims for the human mind’s ability to know the operations of the natural world by mechanical means – to know the things themselves – a knowledge that lay beyond the grasp of the determinate conceptions of the empirical sciences. In order to make sense of the disorderly realm of nature in all its multiplicity and diversity, he claims that we need to think of the natural world as if it possessed an internal systematicity and purposiveness, and we do so by thinking of nature “as if an understanding contained the ground of the unity of the manifold of its empirical laws” (68). Kant’s strategy of reading an intentional design into nature is meant only as a heuristic device to advance our understanding of organic life – which is to say that it has only a regulative rather than a constitutive role to play for our judgments. This “technique of nature” (10), as he calls it, allows researchers to probe various life-forms as if they were produced according to an intelligible idea of the whole, not unlike the creation of the artwork according to the overall design of the artist. To remove the regulative constraints on teleological judgments and make use of the idea of the “natural end” as a determinate principle for our understanding of organized beings and nature as a whole, a move beyond the legislations of the third Critique, is to © 2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd Literature Compass 13/10 (2016): 587–596, 10.1111/lic3.12344 Romantic Evolutions 591 presume that we have access to an intuitive conception of the intrinsic forces of nature. The Romantics and Idealists, particularly in the case of Schelling and his followers, propose just such an intuitive presentation of the natural world as a way to overcome the divide between the subject and object, the ideal and the real, poetry and life. Indeed, they put forward a program of research that presents the world as a living, evolving organism, thus introducing a new avenue for poets and philosophers to inquire into the transformative, vital forces of nature.5 Even Goethe, despite his occasional reservations towards the Romantic worldview, endorses “an intuitive perception of eternally creative nature,” one that facilitates his studies of “primal image and prototype” (31) and eventually leads to his theories of archetypal leaves and bones the most famous of which is the “ur-plant” (Urpf lanz). Kant’s ascription of a teleological view of organic unity did not, however, prevent him or others in Germany and beyond from speculating on the history of nature and its transformation, both for individual beings and nature as a whole. In a fascinating passage on generation in the third Critique, for example, he observes how the “remarkable simplicity of basic design” in animals has produced, “by the involution of this part and the evolution of another,” a “great variety of species” (287). Reminiscent of Goethe and his archetypal theory, Kant suspects that this “analogy of forms” amidst the profusion of life perhaps arises from a common “prototype” (Urbild), which then may trace its genesis to a “common proto-mother” (Urmutter) (287). His ref lections on the transformation of life-forms even leads towards a proto-evolutionary concept of species transformation, an idea that he had previously described in his review of Herder’s Ideas for the Philosophy of the History of Humanity (1784/5) as “so monstrous that reason recoils” (132). To delve into such conjectures, the “archaeologist of nature” must, like a Romantic explorer on expedition, take a “daring adventure of reason” into the contemporary biological debates over the origination of organized beings (Critique 288). Though he rejects the idea of spontaneous generation from lifeless, inorganic matter ( generatio equivoca), he lingers awhile to consider two modes of generation in which one organized being is produced from another ( generatio univoca). The first case of generation refers to the normative idea of parents producing offspring of the same species ( generatio univocal homonyma). In the second case, however, the progenitor produces another form of life that is different from itself ( generatio univocal heteronyma), “as when certain aquatic animals are gradually transformed into amphibians and these, after some generations, into land animals”(288). What Kant’s archaeologist is wading into is not only the question of how monstrous births transform the fixity of nature’s forms but also the embryological question of how the formless, unpredictable forces of the organismic world produce life in the first place. And there were, indeed, many contending theories of the time to account for the forces behind the generation and organization of life, including G.L.L. Buffon’s moule intérieur, J.F. Blumenbach’s Bildungstrieb, or C.F. Wolff’s vis essentialis, to name but a few prominent examples. Kant’s ref lections on the history of nature also dovetail with the literary and botanical meditations of another daring archaeologist of nature writing at the same time in England, a figure whose wide circle of acquaintances included the chemist and discoverer of oxygen Joseph Priestley, inventor and steam-engine manufacturer James Watt, explorer and president of the Royal Society Joseph Banks, and painter of scientific scenes and experiments Joseph Wright. Too often overshadowed by the fame of his grandson Charles, Erasmus Darwin was a leading physician and founding figure of the famed Lunar Society of Birmingham, the translator of Linnaeus’ botanical writings, a distinguished poet in his later years, and a forerunner of Romantic theories of evolution. Like Kant’s imagined scene of the origins of life in the third Critique, Darwin’s heavily annotated scientific poem, The Temple of Nature (1803), conjures an extremely condensed time-lapse sequence of images for the first emergence of primordial aquatic life-forms in the ocean, which gradually transform over generations into amphibious plants and animals that migrate onto land: © 2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd Literature Compass 13/10 (2016): 587–596, 10.1111/lic3.12344 592 Romantic Evolutions Organic Life beneath shoreless waves Was born and nurs’d in Ocean’s pearly caves; First forms minute, unseen by spheric glass, Move on the mud, or pierce the watery mass; These, as successive generations bloom, New powers acquire, and larger limbs assume; Whence countless groups of vegetation spring, And breathing realms of fin, and feet, and wing. (I. 295–302) Darwin, however, takes the next controversial step to propose the shocking idea that “imperious man,” the presumed pinnacle of creation in possession of reason and language, “Arose from rudiments of form and sense, / An embryon point, or microscopic ens!” (I.313–14). And this was not his first attempt to challenge the idea of a fixed and immutable great chain of being; in his earlier text on physiology and medicine, Zoonomia (1794–96), Darwin had proposed a theory of common descent in which “all warm-blooded animals have arisen from one living filament,” a point of origin that may have occurred “millions of ages before the commencement of the history of mankind” (397). Darwin’s evolutionary theories, indeed, drew the ire and condemnation of his contemporaries as well as his reviewers, especially in the case of Coleridge who coined the pejorative terms “Darwinism” and “Darwinizing” to dismiss such ideas of evolution.6 The first of Darwin’s long scientific poems, The Botanic Garden (1791) (containing both The Economy of Vegetation and The Loves of the Plants), also drew criticisms for its use of cumbersome heroic couplets as well as long, technical footnotes to explain the finer points of Linnaean botanical taxonomy; but it also galvanized an international readership around a text that brings together poetry and science. The fact that The Loves of Plants can be read as an early erotic work may have also played a part in elevating the poem to the status of bestseller. Both Kant’s and Darwin’s hesitating steps towards the idea of the historical transformation of species were of course not unique to their natural philosophy but were characteristic of a larger paradigm shift unfolding between the late-18th and early-19th centuries – namely, the move away from preformationism toward epigenesis. In the new sciences, preformationist theories of generation held that future organisms exist in miniature within the egg (ovism) or sperm (animaculism) alternatively and simply unfold (or evolve) during the process of development. Epigeneticists, by contrast, maintained that the organism acquires its form gradually or in stages from unformed materials, guided by the impulse of an immanent vital principle. If thinkers and writers of the period were actively exploring the rich symbiotic relationships between organismic and poetic forms, and if epigenetic ideas of development move beyond prefigured notions of life, what implication does this have for literary and aesthetic theory? In her study of the complicated exchanges amongst the life sciences and Romantic poetry, Denise Gigante argues that these unpredictable and often terrifying powers shaping emergent forms of nature and art can serve as the basis for a novel method of literary criticism that she calls “an epigenesist poetics,” one that brings to light Romanticism’s “cross-disciplinary, transnational approach to living form” (6, 35). Gigante’s text opens new possibilities for the study of organic form from an evolutionary point of view, particularly where she focuses on sublime vital forces and hybrid poetic forms that give rise to “a distinctly Romantic version of monstrosity” (5). Taking the epigenetic point of view beyond examples from poetry, Tilottama Rajan makes the compelling case that Romantic writing – despite the prevailing idea of a set number of preestablished, hierarchically organized genres (e.g. the triad of lyric, epic, drama) – rapidly expands the idea of genre to include a profusion of new species and varieties. In the hands of the German © 2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd Literature Compass 13/10 (2016): 587–596, 10.1111/lic3.12344 Romantic Evolutions 593 Romantics, for example, the epic form comes to include not only the novel but also “genres that are decidedly non-epic,” such as “annals, biographies, travel-writing, confessions and oriental tales” (509). Just as natural historical taxonomies on the model of the Linnaean system were undergoing modification with the discovery of new species and mutations, so too were Romantic genres. This is not to dispense with genres under the f lood of new variations, but to treat them as heuristics to trace the movement of hybrid forms. Indeed Rajan’s epigenetics of genre advocates for a nuanced style of interpretation that attends to the inner dynamics and mutations of the work’s form, its “speciation” (516), rather than simply imposing an external generic classification as though it were a mechanism for subsuming particulars under determinate concepts. In one way or another, the essays in this volume all respond to this evolutionary turn that is taking hold in Romantic studies. The title of the collection is in the plural, Romantic Evolutions, to acknowledge the multiplicity of possible positions, approaches, and interpretive strategies for this emergent area of research, and to avoid the lure of subsuming radical particulars under a totalizing definition that will, one hopes, continue to evolve with future studies in this field. It recalls, too, Arthur O. Lovejoy’s still helpful suggestion to avoid, wherever possible, the unnecessary hypostatization of a term like “Romanticism,” or in this case “evolution,” as “some single real entity, or type of entities, to be found in nature” (8). In our opening article, Allard shows how the paratextual notes to Darwin’s Temple of Nature stage an emergent form of interdisciplinarity in which science engages with poetry to produce a new mode of relationality – indeed a new language – that bridges what we now call the “two cultures” divide, but without privileging any one discipline. Expanding upon Darwin’s playful marriage of the new sciences with literature, Connolly explores how the use of personification to describe plant reproduction in The Loves of Plants moves beyond normative heterosexual desire and towards transgressive interspecies analogies between plants, animals, and humans, analogies that reveal an altogether other form of desire that is capable of producing hybrid, evolving forms of life. Sophie Thomas’ paper then investigates the Romantic museum’s interstitial place between early modern curiosity cabinets and the well-established public institutions of the 19th century, an experimental place whose unique practices of arrangement and display negotiate the various demands to illicit wonder, to demonstrate encyclopedic order and diversity, and eventually to visualize otherwise invisible evolutionary movements in the natural world. Zak Sitter, Jacques Khalip, and Gary Handwerk all interrogate the limits, perhaps even the ends, of not only the organic tradition but also the human organism whose privileged place in the natural world undergoes an irrevocable, defamiliarizing change with the discoveries of deep time and deep space. During this transitional period, geologists like Georges Cuvier and James Hutton uncovered a vastly longer and more complex history of the earth than the natural theological story of creation, and the astronomers William and Caroline Hershel altered established notions of the formation and evolution of the universe with the discovery of new comets, star clusters, nebulae, and the planet Uranus. Such revelations, to be sure, require new modes of thought that challenge the anthropomorphic presuppositions of the existing cultural imaginary. Sitter’s essay tarries with the paradoxical and overdetermined figure of the inorganic, which is at once the origin and other of the organic, its negation and future potentiality. Tracing the unsettling place of the inorganic through various texts of Romantic philosophy and literature, particularly Shelley’s Frankenstein, his analysis opens new possibilities to re-read and complicate our understanding of such fundamental categories as life, intentionality, and the (in)human. Khalip provokes us to rethink evolution together with a more radical concept of extinction that avoids its own reinscription as a teleological end of life, a critical perspective that calls upon us to confront the inhuman, inorganic forces within poetry that short-circuit our familiar notion and affirmation of life, even our commitment to ideas of © 2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd Literature Compass 13/10 (2016): 587–596, 10.1111/lic3.12344 594 Romantic Evolutions “sustainability, futurity, prolongation of life, and human sociability.” Carrying us forward to consider Nietzsche’s idea of nature in light of his engagement with Darwinian theories of evolution by natural selection, both in terms of his differences and creative affinities, Handwerk then outlines a Nietzschean theory of ecology from an evolutionary perspective, one that explores the boundaries and relations between biology and culture as a way to reposition the human within the natural environment. Several essays in the volume also trace varied legacies and remainders of Romanticism’s relation to evolution as they reemerge in the works of various 19th-century writers within and beyond the traditional temporal frames of the period, including Charles Darwin and Charles Lyell. Anthony J. Harding offers a comparative study of Shelley’s poetic use of natural scientific ideas of transformation and Charles Darwin’s early inquiries into notions of species change, with particular emphasis on the conceptual and linguistic strategies both writers employ to probe complex processes of evolution. Employing a similar comparative approach, Andrew Burkett’s essay examines how Wordsworth and Coleridge create poetic forms that pivot around a shift from ontological perspectives of chance as an event toward epistemic representations of chance as an idea, a shift that recurs in Darwin’s move from formal probability (or “botanical arithmetic”) to theoretical speculations of the role of chance and necessity in organic variation and evolution. Pascale Manning turns our attention to Charles Lyell’s development of a theory of geological imagination, akin she proposes to Coleridge’s idea of the secondary imagination, which he then deploys in Principles of Geology (1830) as a special faculty of the scientist to invent a new mode of vision to reconstruct the narrative of the deep, unobserved history of the earth’s formation by gradual, uniform, and constant laws. In a generous and compelling response to each of the papers in this volume, Jonathan Sachs’ afterword traces a genealogy of the concept of evolution in Romantic writing and evolutionary theory across the scientific disciplines, while identifying common themes that emerge within the collection, such as the question of the pace and rates of change, the place of the imagination in literature and science, the boundaries between the organic and the inorganic, and the unsettling tensions between the human and the inhuman. “These essays,” he writes, “may be only an initial provocation towards a thinking of the field of Romantic studies around the issues raised by evolution, but, as evolutionary theory itself teaches us, large changes occur when small ones play themselves out over time.” And if we are seeing a turn to evolution in Romantic studies, as this volume proposes, we are also witnessing a resurgent interest in the disruptive, unsettling forces of life that the New Criticism tried to exorcise from their version of the organicist tradition, forces that we could call organismic. Indeed, the organismic powers that come to light throughout the volume – such as generation, reproduction, disease, and death – often run counter to the earlier model of organic form where parts were carefully controlled under the management of the whole. The evolutionary turn in Romantic studies, by contrast, is oriented towards a renewed focus on restless and unpredictable powers that reside in vital forms of life, both in biology as well as aesthetics. With this return to “life,” however, we need new figures of thought, new vocabularies, and new multidisciplinary approaches – the contributions in Romantic Evolutions offer timely and perspicacious points of departure. I would like to acknowledge a debt of gratitude to Joel Faf lak, co-editor of Literature Compass’ section on Romanticism, who very patiently and generously helped to see this volume through to publication. I would also like to thank my colleagues, Chris Bundock and Naqaa Abbas, who were both fearless collaborators in bringing to life “Romanticism & Evolution,” an international conference at Western University where many of these contributions trace their genesis. This collection would not have been possible without their energy and vision. © 2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd Literature Compass 13/10 (2016): 587–596, 10.1111/lic3.12344 Romantic Evolutions 595 Short Biography Joshua D. Lambier is currently a PhD candidate in the Department of English and Writing Studies at Western University. His dissertation research project, “The Vital Life of Rights in British and European Romanticism,” aims to re-examine the claims of current human rights discourses by returning to their modern genesis in the turbulent political, cultural, and literary debates of the Romantic period. He has published essays in the European Romantic Review, Romantic Circles, and Spheres of Action: Speech and Performance in Romantic Culture (2009). Lambier is currently co-editing a volume of essays on the topic of evolution in Romanticism, Marking Time: Romanticism and Evolution (University of Toronto Press, 2017). He is also the Founding Director of the Public Humanities at Western (www.uwo.ca/ publichumanities) and the Artistic Director of the Words Literary and Creative Arts Festival (http://wordsfest.ca) in London, Ontario, Canada. Notes * Correspondence: Department of English and Writing Studies, Western University, Arts & Humanities Building, Room 2G02, 1151 Richmond Street, London, Ontario N6A3K7, Canada. Email: jlambie2@uwo.ca 1 See Beer’s excellent essay, “Darwin and Romanticism” (2010). “The young Darwin,” she notes, “read the Romantic poets, if not quite as contemporaries, still as the modern canon gathering through his childhood and youth. He was a schoolboy when Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage was published between 1812 and 1818, Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound appeared in 1820, and Walter Schott’s Antiquary in 1816. Those three poets are among the many that he cites in the private notebooks of 1837 and 1838 written on his first return from the Beagle and in the reading lists he maintained from 1838 through to 1860” (3). Beer’s argument moves on to consider “the Notebooks in Barrett’s edition and to Darwin’s Reading Notebooks … as sources for understanding the formation of Darwin’s creativity” (3). 2 In recent years, the field of Romantic science has emerged as a vibrant and diverse area of inquiry for studies of Romanticism, with compelling works by McLane, Richardson, Roe, Heringman, Jackson, Allard, Gigante, Kelley, Mitchell, and Fulford, Lee, and Kitson, amongst many others. 3 Beer (1996) and Levine (2011) offer two exemplary works that marry literary criticism with evolutionary science, particularly for scholars of the nineteenth century, though one could also trace this growing area of interest in the rise of the “literary Darwinisim” movement in recent books by Carroll, Boyd, and Gottschall and Wilson. 4 See, for example, the pioneering works in the field by Beer (1983) and Levine (1988), but also more recent studies by Hopkins, Amigoni, J. Holmes, and Lightman and Zon. 5 For a further discussion of Romanticism’s organic conception of nature, see Beiser, Chapters 8 and 9, as well as Richards and Gigante. 6 King-Hele provides an insightful account of Coleridge’s reaction to Darwin’s theory of biological evolution in Chapters 5 and 6 of his book, Erasmus Darwin and the Romantic Poets. Works Cited Allard, J Romanticism, Medicine, and the Poet’s Body. Burlington: Ashgate, 2007. Amigoni, D. Colonies, Cults and Evolution: Literature, Science and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007. Beer, G. ‘Darwin and Romanticism.’ Wordsworth Circle 41 (2010): 3–9. —— Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983. —— Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996. Beiser, F. The Romantic Imperative: The Concept of Early German Romanticism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2003. Boyd, B. On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2009. Carroll, J. Literary Darwinism: Evolution, Human Nature, and Literature. New York: Routledge, 2004. © 2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd Literature Compass 13/10 (2016): 587–596, 10.1111/lic3.12344 596 Romantic Evolutions Coleridge, S. T. Hints Towards the Formation of a More Comprehensive Theory of Life. Ed. S. B. Watson. Philadelphia: Lea and Blanchard, 1848. Darwin, Erasmus. The Temple of Nature, or The Origin of Society. Ed. Martin Priestman. Romantic Circles Electronic Editions 2006. Retrieved on 8 May 2015 http://www.rc.umd.edu/editions/darwin_temple/. Darwin, E. Zoonomia; or, The Laws of Organic Life. Dublin: B. Dugdale, 1800. De Almeida, H. ‘Romanticism and the Triumph of Life Science: Prospects for Study.’ Studies in Romanticism 43.1 (2004): 119–34. Eichner, H. ‘The Rise of Modern Science and the Genesis of Romanticism.’ PMLA 97.1 (1982): 8–30. Fulford, T., D. Lee, and P. J. Kitson. Literature, Science and Exploration in the Romantic Era: Bodies of Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004. Gigante, D. Life: Organic Form and Romanticism. New Haven: Yale UP, 2009. Goethe, J. W. Scientific Studies. Ed. D. Miller. Ed. and Trans. New York: Suhrkamp Publishers, 1988. Gottschall, J. and D. S. Wilson, eds. The Literary Animal: Evolution and the Nature of Narrative. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 2005. Heringman, N. Romantic Rocks, Aesthetic Geology. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2004. Holmes, J. Darwin’s Bards: British and American Poetry in the Age of Evolution. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2009. Holmes, R. The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science. London: Harper Press, 2009. Hopkins, L. Giants of the Past: Popular Fictions and the Idea of Evolution. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 2004. Jackson, N. Science and Sensation in Romantic Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2008. Kant, I. The Critique of the Power of Judgment. Ed. Paul Guyer. Trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000. ——. “Review of J.G. Herder’s Ideas for the Philosophy of History of Humanity. Parts 1 and 2.” Anthropology, History, and Education. Ed. Günter Zöller and Robert B. Louden. Trans. Allen W. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007. Kelley, T. M. Clandestine Marriage: Botany and Romantic Culture. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2012. King-Hele, D. Erasmus Darwin and the Romantic Poets. London: Macmillan, 1986. Levine, G. Darwin and the Novelists: Patterns of Science in Victorian Fiction. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1988. —— Darwin the Writer. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011. Lightman, B. and B. Zon, eds. Evolution and Victorian Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2014. Lovejoy, A. O. ‘On the Discrimination of Romanticisms.’ English Romantic Poets: Modern Essays in Criticism. Ed. M. H. Abrams. New York: Oxford UP, 1960. McLane, M. Romanticism and the Human Sciences. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000. Mitchell, R. Experimental Life: Vitalism in Romantic Science and Literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2013. Orsini, G. N. G. ‘The Organic Concepts in Aesthetics.’ Comparative Literature 21.1 (1969): 1–30. Rajan, T. ‘The Epigenesis of Genre: New Forms from Old.’ The Cambridge History of English Romantic Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009. Richards, R. J. The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and Philosophy in the Age of Goethe. Chicago: Chicago UP, 2002. Richardson, A. British Romanticism and the Science of Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001. Roe, N. Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the Sciences of Life. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001. Wimsatt, W. K. ‘Organic Form: Some Questions About a Metaphor.’ Organic Form: The Life of an Idea. Ed. G. S. Rousseau. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972. Wordsworth, W. Poetical Works. Eds. E. De Selincourt and H. Darbishire. Vol. 5. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1949. © 2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd Literature Compass 13/10 (2016): 587–596, 10.1111/lic3.12344