This chapter examines how the science of man became the natural history of man, a history not of individuals or nations but of the human species. A new biological conception of species “as an entity distributed in time and space,” released from the synchronic grid of Linnaean taxonomy as well as from a providential cosmology, comprised what Philip Sloan has called the “Buffonian revolution.” That revolution would be as consequential for literary genres, especially the novel, as it was for the natural and human sciences, in part due to Buffon's recourse to a literary style and techniques of “speculative thought experiment,” probabilistic reasoning, “analogical reasoning, and divination” in his scientific method. The chapter then looks at the debate over the history of man that broke out in the mid-1780s between Immanuel Kant and Gottfried Herder. One of the great intellectual quarrels of the late Enlightenment, it signposted the forking paths of Kant's critical philosophy, on the one hand, and the scientific project of natural history on the other.
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This chapter addresses how the politics of the revolutionary era charged the intellectual debates and institutional rivalries that were agitating the emergent science of the forms of life, centered now in Paris. Arguing for the reform of knowledge as a necessary condition of political reform, scientific authors opposed to the Bourbon regime rallied around Lamarckism, and transformist natural history more broadly, throughout the 1820s. Jean-Baptiste Lamarck's protégé Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, emerging as a leading light of the liberal movement, made monstrosity a key research program of the new philosophical anatomy. Geoffroy sought to reaffirm the orderliness of nature by insisting that monstrosities were natural phenomena, subject to natural law-deviations, on classifiable principles, from the archetypal regularity of the species, itself subject to the grand law of “unity of organic composition.” At the same time, monstrosity provided a mechanism for the transformation of species. The chapter then looks at examples of historical fiction and romances that feature powers beyond human nature, such as Victor Hugo's Notre-Dame de Paris.
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This chapter assesses Germaine de Staël's reckoning with the “new genres or sub-genres characteristic of realism,” the Bildungsroman and its British analogues, the Anglo-Irish national tale and Scottish historical novel, formed in the “novelistic revolution” of European Romanticism. Modeling the scientific conception of human nature as a developmental entity or emergent phenomenon, these new genres or subgenres rehearse a universal formation of species being—a Bildung der Humanität—through the ontogenetic narrative of subject formation. Staël's broad target is the structural exclusion of women from the category that underwrites the new forms of the novel: the Enlightenment's grand universal particular, “man.” And yet, excluded from the new conception of humanity, women were most fully expressive of it. Where men are fixed in a social taxonomy, like animals in the system of nature, women possess the plasticity and fluidity, the capacity to move up and down the scale of being, that are specific markers of the human in late Enlightenment anthropology.
本章评估Germaine de Staël对“现实主义的新体裁或子体裁特征”的清算，成长小说及其英国类似作品，盎格鲁-爱尔兰民族故事和苏格兰历史小说，形成于欧洲浪漫主义的“小说革命”。这些新的体裁或子体裁将人性的科学概念建模为一个发展的实体或突现现象，它们预演了一种物种存在的普遍形成——一种主体形成的个体发生叙事Humanität-through。Staël的大目标是从结构上把女性排除在支撑小说新形式的范畴之外:启蒙运动的宏大普遍的特殊，“男人”。然而，由于被排除在人类的新概念之外，妇女最充分地表达了这一概念。男性在社会分类中是固定的，就像自然系统中的动物一样，而女性则具有可塑性和流动性，在存在的尺度上上下移动的能力，这是启蒙运动后期人类学中人类的具体标志。
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Pub Date : 2014-02-01DOI: 10.1525/REP.2014.125.1.15
I. Duncan
This concluding chapter focuses on George Eliot's Middlemarch. The main business of Middlemarch, formulated as the premise of its opening rhetorical question, is with a scientific project, “the history of man.” While George Eliot's literary career coincided with Charles Darwin's, she did not immediately digest his theory; her fiction activates other developmental forces besides natural selection, and deranges the scientific thought it brings into play. In doing so, it churns up the not-yet-settled, volatile currents of that scientific thought-including Darwin's, who was not always (himself) a pure Darwinist. With that, it deranges its own aesthetic protocols, so often read as an Olympian consummation of Victorian realism. “To a degree that the catchall term 'realism' obscures,” writes Lauren Goodlad, “Eliot's oeuvre is generically diverse, bold, and experimental.” The chapter seeks to recapture the unsettling force of that experimentalism: to make George Eliot strange again.
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