Reconfiguring Nature after Darwin: Skepticism and Sexuality in High Modernist Literature

Many writers in the High Modernism period (1890–1940) took a more inclusive view of nature than their predecessors, viewing humans more as fellow natural creatures dwelling among other living things than as creatures linked closely to God in a great chain of being. Stimulated by Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859) and historical criticism of the Bible, modern authors such as Hardy, Conrad, Woolf, and Forster were skeptical that we lived in a world shaped, in Wordsworth’s words, by “God's holy plan.” They proposed instead that we inhabit an amoral cosmos where nature is indifferent, if not antagonistic, to human aspirations. In T.S. Eliot’s case, the world is imagined as a desiccated wasteland.  In Lawrence and Joyce, human sexuality is ­an expression of an instinctive and intimate alternative to the blights of industrialism and its effects, loss of faith, and materialism ­is described in terms of images taken from the natural world. Professor Schwarz will discuss the diverse ways that the aforementioned and other authors imagine and present nature in all its variety and diversity.