Research Catalog

Title

Robert Frost and the challenge of Darwin / Robert Faggen.

Author

Faggen, Robert.

Publication

Ann Arbor : University of Michigan Press, [1997], ©1997.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Holdings

Details

Description

xii, 363 pages; 24 cm

Summary

• In Robert Frost and the Challenge of Darwin, Frost's poetry is viewed as a powerful response to Charles Darwin and the implications of modern science. Combining both intellectual history and detailed analysis of Frost's poems, Robert Faggen shows how Frost's reading of Darwin reflected the significance of science in American culture from Emerson and Thoreau through James and pragmatism.
• He provides fresh and provocative readings of many of Frost's shorter lyrics and longer pastoral narratives as they illustrate the impact of Darwinian thought on the concept of nature, with particular exploration of man's relationship to other creatures, the conditions of human equality and racial conflict, the impact of gender and sexual differences, and the survival of religion.
• Faggen draws on Frost's unpublished notebooks to reveal a complex thinker who willingly engaged with the difficult moral and epistemological implications of natural science and showed their consonance with myths and traditions stretching back to Milton, Lucretius, and the Old Testament. Frost emerges as a thinker for whom poetry was not only artistic expression but also a forum for the trial of ideas and their impact on humanity.
• Robert Frost and the Challenge of Darwin provides a deeper understanding not only of Frost and modern poetry but of the meaning of Darwin in the modern world, the complex interrelations of literature and science, and the history of American thought.

Subject

• Frost, Robert, 1874-1963 > Knowledge and learning
• Darwin, Charles, 1809-1882 > Influence
• Science
• Literature and science > United States > History > 20th century
• Natural history
• American poetry > English influences
• Natural history in literature
• Evolution in literature

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references (p. 347-357) and index.

Contents

Ch. 1. The Fact Is the Sweetest Dream: Darwin, Pragmatism, and Poetic Knowledge -- Ch. 2. What to Make of a Diminished Thing: Birds, Insects, and Downward Comparisons -- Ch. 3. Play for Mortal Stakes: Labor, Community, and Nature's Chaos -- Ch. 4. Tools and Weapons: Man, Technology, and Nature -- Ch. 5. The Lovely Shall Be Choosers: Women, Nature, and Domestic Conflict -- Ch. 6. Descent into Matter: Natural History and the End of Theodicy -- Epilogue: Choosing Stars and Picking Apples.

ISBN

0472107828 (hardcover : alk. paper)

LCCN

97004481

OCLC

ocm36187571

Owning Institutions

Columbia University Libraries