This book studies Charles Darwin's writing as literature, and The Origin of Species as the most important book in English in the 19th century, and surprisingly, one of the most beautiful. Reading Darwin's work with the kind of attention one might direct to a great novel helps reveal Darwin's own personal voice in the midst of the scientific context, helps emphasize his extraordinary handling of language and his strategies of argument and representation, while emphasizing the emotional implications of his writing. The book traces the development of Darwin's way of seeing and imagining from his ... More

This book studies Charles Darwin's writing as literature, and The Origin of Species as the most important book in English in the 19th century, and surprisingly, one of the most beautiful. Reading Darwin's work with the kind of attention one might direct to a great novel helps reveal Darwin's own personal voice in the midst of the scientific context, helps emphasize his extraordinary handling of language and his strategies of argument and representation, while emphasizing the emotional implications of his writing. The book traces the development of Darwin's way of seeing and imagining from his first book, The Voyage of the Beagle, through the On the Origin of Species, to The Descent of Man. It emphasizes the importance of his metaphors, his instinct for paradox (and their scientific and strategic uses), the ‘double movement’ of his writing, the love of nature evident in his meticulous descriptions, and the way his writing anticipated and influenced modernist or proto-modernist writers like Walter Pater, Thomas Hardy, and Oscar Wilde. It attempts to demonstrate that Darwin's ‘tragic vision’ is often also a ‘comic vision’, and that he renders mindless nature as awesome and beautiful. For Darwin, the world was marvellously ‘entangled’ and interconnected, every organism related to every other, and each slightest detail implicated in a vast history.