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SUMMARY:Darwin in the Literary World - Professor Rebecca Stott\, Universit
 y of East Anglia
DTSTART:20090206T173000Z
DTEND:20090206T183000Z
UID:TALK13704@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Janet Gibson
DESCRIPTION:Abstract\n\nWithin months of Darwin’s publication of the Ori
 gin of Species\, novelists\, poets and artists began to turn Darwin’s id
 eas into art. That they have continued to do so up to the present day is a
  testimony to the imaginative reach of Darwin’s ideas as well as to the 
 extent to which they transformed ways of seeing. Darwinism can be seen run
 ning through some of the late nineteenth century’s most richly imaginati
 ve prose and poetry including Kingsley’s The Water Babies\, Carroll’s 
 Alice in Wonderland\, Bram Stoker’s Dracula\, H.G. Wells’ Island of Dr
  Moreau and Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. But where nineteenth-cent
 ury writers may have seen hybrid monsters\, degeneration and extinction\, 
 Darwinism has come to have new meanings for each subsequent generation of 
 writers and artists. Novelist and academic Rebecca Stott will show this pe
 rpetual re-making and ‘making new’ of Darwin’s ideas by taking a lit
 erary journey through late nineteenth-century fiction\, to the poetry of T
 homas Hardy\, Ted Hughes and Ruth Padel and to the contemporary novels of 
 Ian McEwan and A.S. Byatt to show that writers have not just re-used Darwi
 n’s ideas but have translated\, adapted and extended them in fascinating
  ways.\n\nBiography\n\nRebecca Stott is Professor of Literature and Creati
 ve Writing at the University of East Anglia in Norwich where she teaches b
 oth creative writing and nineteenth-century literature. As an academic she
  is the author of a number of books and articles about nineteenth-century 
 poets such as Tennyson (1996) and Elizabeth Barrett Browning (2003)\, as w
 ell as books on the cross-fertilisations of literature and science such as
  The Fabrication of the Late Nineteenth-Century Femme Fatale (1996) and Oy
 ster (2003). In 2003 she published Darwin and the Barnacle (Faber\, 2003) 
 a novelistic study of the eight years Darwin spent dissecting barnacles wh
 ich received considerable acclaim and reached a wide readership. As a nove
 list she is the author of Ghostwalk (2003)\, a historical thriller and gho
 st story about Isaac Newton’s alchemy set in seventeenth-century Cambrid
 ge\, which was shortlisted for two literary awards and has been translated
  into fifteen different languages including Mandarin and Russian. Her seco
 nd novel\, The Coral Thief (2009)\, a love story set in post-Napoleonic Pa
 ris in which a group Lamarkian savants stage an audacious theft from a mus
 eum in the Jardin des Plantes in 1815\, will be published in the summer of
  2009. Her next academic book\, Speculators: Poets and Philosophers of Evo
 lution\, a study of the migration of evolutionary ideas across Europe pre-
 Darwin\, will be published in 2010 by Chicago University Press.   \n
LOCATION:LMH\, Lady Mitchell Hall
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