Unmapped Countries: Biological Visions in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture (review)

This fine collection of sixteen essays originated in an international conference held at the Centre for British Studies at the University of Bamberg. The authors focus on the exchange between biology, literature, and culture in the nineteenth century; although some essays discuss German, Russian, or American figures, British novelists and scientists predominate. Anne-Julia Zwierlein has gathered together a strong international group of contributors composed of the right mix of well-known senior scholars, such as Janet Browne, Laura Otis, Sally Shuttleworth, and Kate Flint, and up-and-coming young Turks. Their expertise lies in a broad range of disciplines, including English, comparative literature, the history of science, the history of medicine, art history, and women's studies, and the result is a rich, interdisciplinary set of essays.

The collection is divided into three parts. Part one, "Science and Literature," contains two essays that treat the role of the imagination in science as well as the issue of scientific authority. In "Evolution and Degeneration," part two, there are seven essays, dealing with such topics as the problematic immoral ideas in Charles Darwin's Descent of Man (1871), Darwin and feminism, Darwin's influence on utopian and dystopian fiction, Peter Kropotkin's theories about human sociability, the influence of evolutionary anthropology on fictional treatments of the unconscious, Darwinism in the art of Alfred Kubin, and debates over the significance of color in Homer. The seven essays in part three, "Physiology and Pathology," investigate the relationship between medicine and literature, including the notion of contagion in Rudolf Virchow and George Eliot; sensation novels and medical conceptions of women; medical and literary representations of childhood fear; and the discourse about parasites, surgery, and the senses in both science and literature.

Edited collections of essays based on conferences are prone to a number of problems. The contributions can be uneven in quality. This cannot, however, be said of this particular collection: each of the essays has a sparkle and charm of its own. Some collections lack coherence. But by focusing on nineteenth-century British biology, this work avoids trying to cover all of the sciences or all national contexts. Yet another common problem with edited conference volumes is the lag between the original event and the publication—many of these volumes take too long to be published, and their relevance to current scholarship can be compromised as a result. But again, the editor and the contributors are to be congratulated, as these papers from a 2004 conference have been edited and published relatively quickly. The project can be criticized for one shortcoming: the volume contains a large number of essays and they are relatively short in length. There were times when I wished that the authors had had more time to delve more deeply into their topics.

Scholarly work in the field of Victorian science and literature has come a long, long way in the last twenty years. Inspired by the work of Gillian Beer, especially her Darwin's Plots (1983), and George Levine, in particular his Darwin and the Novelists (1988), the field has moved from a simplistic examination of the impact of science on literary texts to complex studies of the two-way traffic between scientific and literary discourse. Both were part of one culture during the Victorian era, notwithstanding the debates between T. H. Huxley and Matthew Arnold. But Zwierlein is critical of Beer and Levine for initiating the "focus on evolutionary theory which has dominated scholarly debates ever since" (1). She proposes to correct the overemphasis on evolutionary theory in past scholarship by giving equal weight in the collection to the Victorians' interest in networks of cells and nerves and to post-Romantic organicism. "The collection aims at demonstrating," she declares, "that the relation between literature, culture and biology in the nineteenth century is far more complex than the habitual reference to Darwin would have us believe" (7). Since parts two and three contain the same...