Modernist Life Histories: Biological Theory and the Experimental Bildungsroman

Reflects contemporary paradigm shifts in embryology and evolutionary theory through formal experimentation in the modernist Bildungsroman

Modernist Life Histories explores how new models of embryonic development helped inspire new kinds of coming-of-age plots during the first half of the twentieth century. Focusing on novels by E. M. Forster, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Aldous Huxley and Samuel Beckett, the book links narrative experiments with shuffled chronology, repeated beginnings and sex change to new discoveries in the biological sciences. It also reveals new connections between the so-called Two Cultures by highlighting how scientific ideas and narratives enter the literary realm.

Key Features

Provides a unique perspective on the Bildungsroman (novel of formation), one of the most discussed genres in recent scholarly work on modernism Approaches the study of science and literature with exceptionally close attention to the details of scientific models, their cultural appropriations, and their political implications Makes the first thoroughgoing argument for twentieth-century biology as a positive influence on modernist poetics and ethics Models how narrative theory can serve the goals of interdisciplinary research