Introduction - Valerie Purton; Chapter 1: Tennyson's 'Locksley Hall': Progress and Destitution -Roger Ebbatson; Chapter 2: 'Tennyson's Drift': Evolution in 'The Princess' - Rebecca Stott; Chapter 3: History, Materiality and Type in Tennyson's 'In Memoriam' - Matthew Rowlinson; Chapter 4: Darwin, Tennyson and the Writing of 'The Holy Grail' - Valerie Purton; Chapter 5: 'An Undue Simplification': Tennyson's Evolutionary Afterlife - Michiel Nys; Chapter 6: 'Like a Megatherium Smoking a Cigar': Darwin's Beagle Fossils in Nineteenth-Century Popular Culture - Gowan Dawson; Chapter 7: 'No Such Thing as a Flower [...] No Such Thing as a Man': John Ruskin's Response to Darwin - Clive Wilmer; Chapter 8: Darwin and the Art of Paradox - George Levine; Chapter 9: Systems and Extravagance: Darwin, Meredith, Tennyson - Gillian Beer; Chapter 10: T. H. Huxley, Science and Cultural Agency - Jeff Wallace; Notes on Contributors
'Darwin, Tennyson and Their Readers' is an edited collection of essays from leading authorities in the field of Victorian literature and science, including Gillian Beer and George Levine. The academic study of the interpenetration of Victorian literature and science has grown to be one of the largest and most dynamic areas in Victorian studies: in this collection, leading exponents in the field consider recent developments. The major figures and exact contemporaries, Charles Darwin and Alfred, Lord Tennyson are considered, in the company of John Ruskin, Thomas Huxley, Richard Owen, George Meredith, Oscar Wilde and others. Throughout, the stress is on the ways in which these writers read and were influenced by each other. Our current understanding of this complex cultural dialogue is illustrated here in a single accessible volume of essays by established scholars in this dynamic academic interdiscipline.