Title: The descent of love
First published: 1996
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.
Subjects: American Love stories, American fiction, Courtship in literature, English influences, Evolution (Biology) in literature, History and criticism, Influence, Literature and science, Love in literature, Love stories, American, Mate selection in literature, Sex in literature, American fiction, history and criticism, 19th century, American fiction, history and criticism, 20th century, Man-woman relationships in literature, American Romance fiction, History, Genetic Selection, In literature, Modern Literature
Places: English-speaking countries
People: Charles Darwin (1809-1882)
Time periods: 19th century, 20th century
LC classification: PS374.L6 B46 1996