Marking Time Romanticism & Evolution EditEd by JoEl FaFlak MARKING TIME Romanticism and Evolution EDITED BY JOEL FAFLAK Marking Time Romanticism and Evolution UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London © University of Toronto Press 2017 Toronto Buffalo London www.utorontopress.com ISBN 978-1-4426-4430-4 (cloth) Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Marking time : Romanticism and evolution / edited by Joel Faflak. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4426-4430-4 (hardcover) 1. Romanticism. 2. Evolution (Biology) in literature. 3. Literature and science. I. Faflak, Joel, 1959–, editor PN603.M37 2017 809'.933609034 C2017-905010-9 CC-BY-NC-ND This work is published subject to a Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial No Derivative License. For permission to publish commercial versions please contact University of Tor onto Press. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario. Funded by the Financé par le Government gouvernement of Canada du Canada Contents List of Illustrations vii Acknowledgments ix Introduction – Marking Time: Romanticism and Evolution 3 joel faflak Part One: Romanticism’s Darwin 1 Plants, Analogy, and Perfection: Loose and Strict Analogies 29 gillian beer 2 Darwin and the Mobility of Species 45 alan bewell 3 Darwin’s Ideas 68 matthew rowlinson Part Two: Romantic Temporalities 4 Deep Time in the South Pacifi c: Scientifi c Voyaging and the Ancient/Primitive Analogy 95 noah heringman 5 Malthus Our Contemporary? Toward a Political Economy of Sex 122 maureen n. mclane vi Contents Part Three: Goethe and the Contingencies of Life 6 Structure and Advancement in Goethe’s Morphology 147 gábor áron zemplén 7 Vertiginous Life: Goethe, Bones, and Italy 173 andrew piper 8 Taking Chances 200 theresa m. kelley Part Four: Evolutionary Idealisms 9 Did Goethe and Schelling Endorse Species Evolution? 219 robert j. richards 10 The Vitality of Idealism: Life and Evolution in Schelling’s and Hegel’s Systems 239 tilottama rajan 11 Degeneration: Inversions of Teleology 270 joan steigerwald Contributors 301 Index 305 Illustrations 2.1 Escher, Metamorphosis II 53 2.2 From the fi rst edition of On the Origin of Species 55 4.1 Unsigned engraving. Collection of Etruscan, Greek, and Roman Antiquities [ AEGR ], Vol. I, p. 112 (Chapter III headpiece [English text]) 100 4.2 Unsigned engraving. Collection of Etruscan, Greek, and Roman Antiquities [ AEGR ], Vol. I, p. 113 (Chapter III headpiece [French text]) 101 4.3 A toupapow with a corpse on it, attended by the Chief Mourner in his habit of ceremony 110 6.1 “Ginkgo biloba,” poem by Goethe, 15 September 1815 156 7.1 Fig. XV, Plate II, from Carl Gustav Carus, Von den Ur-Theilen des Knochen- und Schalengerüstes 174 7.2 Arena di Verona 179 7.3 J.W. Goethe, Anatomical study 184 7.4 Marcantino Raimondi, Hercules 186 7.5 J.W. Goethe, Vertebra (Wirbelknochen) 192 9.1 Wilhelm Weitz’s illustration prepared for Goethe’s essay on the Zwischenkiefer 222 9.2 Plate from Richard Owen’s On the Nature of Limbs (1849) 225 9.3 Illustrations from Carl Gustav Carus, Von den Ur-Theilen des Knochen und Schalengerüstes 226 9.4 Illustration of a Megatherium, from Heinz Christian Pander and Eduard d’Alton’s Das Riesen-Faultier Bradypus Giganteus 233 9.5 Georges Cuvier’s comparison of skulls of two species of sloth 234 Acknowledgments This volume has had a long gestation, materializing in rather ironic but very real terms the time of evolution itself. Its inspiration was “Romanticism and Evolu- tion,” an international conference held 12–14 May 2011 at Western University, London, Ontario, at that time still called The University of Western Ontario – an evolution, to be sure. The co-organizers were three stellar graduate students – Naqaa Abbas, Chris Bundock, and Joshua Lambier – whom I had the great plea- sure of shepherding through the organization of that three-day event, the planning and execution of which they handled superbly. I remain indebted to their incred- ible collegiality, intelligence, vision, patience, and administrative savvy. I especially want to thank Josh Lambier, whose background research and prose for the original conference proposal were the inspiration for the volume’s Introduction. It has been wonderful working again with the University of Toronto Press, where I am especially indebted to three people. Editor Richard Ratzlaff remained loyal to and excited about this project from the start, as well as patient with its long trajectory when others might have called “extinct!” I am very happy to have the opportunity to work a second time with Barb Porter, who oversaw the final stages of production with no fuss, and a first time with copy-editor Kel Pero, who displayed extraordinary professionalism, acute editorial sense, and a great sense of humour. I also thank three anonymous Press reviewers, whose honest, fair, and generous criticism helped to refine even further an already stellar group of essays. Among the support and encouragement I am extremely lucky to receive from the academic community, I want to single out Allan Pero and Richard C. Sha, the lat- ter of whom offered invaluable feedback on the Introduction. They are colleagues and friends of the first order. The Trustees of Boston University kindly granted permission to reprint Mau- reen McLane’s essay, originally published in Studies in Romanticism, vol. 52, no. 3, 2013, pp. 337–62, and at Studies in Romanticism I thank Chuck Rzekpa and x Acknowledgments Deborah Swedberg for their generosity. Publication of Marking Time has been sup- ported by a grant from the Aid to Scholarly Publishing Program, overseen by the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, and by funds partly earmarked for the volume’s editing and publication from a grant through the Canada Aid to Research Workshops and Conferences in Canada Program, administered through the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. I am grateful to live in a country where such support for Humanities scholarship remains intact. Above all, I thank my contributors. Your patience with this project is a thing of biblical proportion. If the readiness is all, I was not always ready, and you had every right to question the volume’s slow time. Academic publishing often follows a glacial pace, but really. I am grateful that you survived to observe where evolu- tion took things, and I feel confident that the brilliance of your work will adapt to future times. I take full responsibility for any unexpected mutations in the final product. This volume is dedicated to my late friend and mentor, Ross Woodman. Osten- sibly, its topic overlaps very little with his Romantic scholarship. But Ross knew, with rather uncanny insight, how history and the unconscious run deep and slow. Of his many gifts to me, one was the capacity to understand that even in – espe- cially in – psychic terms, “extinction” is relative. Or as Harper Pitt says at the end of Angels in America, “Nothing’s lost forever. In this world, there is a kind of pain- ful progress. Longing for what we’ve left behind, and dreaming ahead. At least I think that’s so.” And finally, I thank Norm and our menagerie, who keep me dreaming ahead and who always lighten extinction’s sometimes dark shadow. And that is so. MARKING TIME Introduction – Marking Time: Romanticism and Evolution joel faflak I. Although Victorian studies have long explored the seismic impact of On the Origin of Species (1859) on nineteenth-century culture, Charles Darwin’s text did not have an immaculate conception. The product of post-Enlightenment thought, Origin exerted considerable influence on post-1859 debates about the order of life and being well into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. We less readily imag- ine this influence as extending backward to Romantic thought and writing. Yet mapping Romantic evolution is more than merely seeking eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century “forerunners” to the Darwinian revolution. Marking Time: Romanticism and Evolution explores Romanticism’s liminal position between the classical idea of an immutable, atemporal “great chain of being,” outlined by Arthur O. Lovejoy’s 1936 landmark study of the same name, and the rise in Romanticism of modern historiographies. This volume presents Romanticism as its own age of evolution by revisiting our notions of organicism, life, vitalism, natural history, and natural philosophy in relation to less-acknowledged notions of change and transformation in the cultural, literary, philosophical, and scientific discourses of the period. At the same time, our contributors track the remainders of Romanticism in the works of Charles Darwin, from his early reading of Word- sworth, Scott and Percy Shelley, to his study of Goethe, Schiller and Humboldt, to his lifelong interest in shared modes of subjective experience in the investigation of art and science. In general, the following essays challenge prevailing histories of evolution. Our contributors pay close attention to emergent, evolutionary themes of Romantic-era science, such as Romantic-Idealist conceptions of degeneration, morphology, species change, and organismic archetypes; the scientist’s intimate observation of the various forms of mobility and the analogical relations of plants and animals; the discovery of an anthropological concept of deep time in the art, 4 Joel Fafl ak artefacts, and travel narratives culled from voyages of exploration; and the rei- magination of the interdisciplinary relationships among related fields of inquiry, past and present, including political economy, sociology, optics, archaeology, and modern genetics.