Darwin in Wonderland: Evolution, Involution and Natural Selection in The Water Babies (1863)

Miranda: Revue Pluridisciplinaire du Monde Anglophone

关键词: Darwinism;    evolution;    natural selection;    Victorian fairy tales;    Darwin;   

DOI  :  10.4000/miranda.376

来源: DOAJ

【 摘 要 】

Why does Alice meet a Dodo? Why did Victorian fairies stop performing their traditional functions in the 1860s and take on the role of naturalists? If Charles Darwin famously triggered the evolution revolution, he also inspired a novel genre that saw his followers reinvent the idiom of fairyland by creating a new literary species: the scientific fairy tale. After the publication of The Origin of Species, dodos, fossils, shells and tortoises, to cite but a few Darwinian specimens, came to colonise the pages of children’s fantasy books, and fairy-tale heroes subsequently debated the theories of Richard Owen, Thomas Huxley and Charles Darwin. This paper wishes to present a natural selection of one of the best examples of the Fairy Science, such as Charles Kingsley’s The Water Babies and will also focus on the use of Darwinian ideas in modern children fantasy writings.

【 授权许可】

Unknown