The descent of love
Subtitle: Darwin and the theory of sexual selection in American fiction, 1871-1926
By: Bert Bender.
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: 1996
Place of publication: Philadelphia
Language: eng
Number of pages: 440
Subjects: Darwin, Charles, 1809-1882 -- Influence.; American fiction -- 19th century -- History and criticism.; Love stories, American -- History and criticism.; American fiction -- 20th century -- History and criticism.; Literature and science -- English-speaking countries.; American fiction -- English influences.; Evolution (Biology) in literature.; Mate selection in literature.; Courtship in literature.; Love in literature.; Sex in literature.
Description: Upon its publication in 1871, Charles Darwin's The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex sent shock waves through the scientific community and the public at large. In an original and persuasive study, Bert Bender demonstrates that it is this treatise, rather than any of Darwin's earlier works, that provoked the most immediate and vigorous response from American fiction writers.

These authors embraced and incorporated Darwin's theories, insights, and language, creating an increasingly dark and violent view of sexual love in American realist literature.

In The Descent of Love, Bender carefully rereads the works of William Dean Howells, Henry James, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Sarah Orne Jewett, Kate Chopin, Harold Frederic, Charles W. Chesnutt, Edith Wharton, and Ernest Hemingway, teasing from them a startling but utterly convincing preoccupation with questions of sexual selection.

Competing for readership as novelists who best grasped the "real" nature of human love, these writers also participated in a heated social debate over racial and sexual differences and the nature of sex itself.

Influenced more by The Descent of Man than by the Origin of Species, Bender's novelists built upon Darwin's anthropological and zoological materials to anatomize their characters' courtship behavior, returning consistently to concerns with physical beauty, natural dominance, and the power to select a mate.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [405]-419) and index.