Page argues that Erasmus Darwin's call to 'enlist the imagination under the banner of science' began a literary narrative on questions of evolution, ecology and technological progress that would extend from the Romantic through the Victorian periods. Examining a range of writers, including William Wordsworth, Mary Shelley, Charles Kingsley, Samuel Butler and W.H. Hudson, Page shows the synthesis of evolutionary science with the imagination, which reached its pinnacle with the romances of H.G. Wells.

Michael R. Page is a Lecturer in the English Department at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. His research focuses on literature's encounter with science and technology in the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries.

Contents: Introduction: 'the banner of science': science and the 19th-century British literary imagination; 'Beautiful and sublime images of the operations of nature': Erasmus Darwin; 'Mirrors of the gigantic shadows of futurity': Wordsworth and Shelley; 'A new species': Mary Shelley's science fiction novels; 'A tangled bank': Darwinian science fictions; 'Dim outlines on a desolate beach': H.G. Wells; Conclusion: 'where do we go from here?'; Works cited; Index.