Collectives of Evolution

The nineteenth century was the century of evolution. No theories made a comparably seismic impact on Western intellectual life as those of Darwin, Spencer, and Lamarck. In the U.S., their ideas forced authors to rethink what it meant to be American amid racial tensions and calls for women’s rights. Heinrich-David Baumgart traces how notions like uplift, eugenics, and the unconscious shaped a discursive landscape in which marginalized groups claimed social equality around 1900. Reading authors such as Frances E. W. Harper and Kate Chopin, the volume offers scholars of American literature, cultural history, and the life sciences a new perspective on the entangled histories of evolutionary thought, social emancipation, and cultural identity.