Darwin's plots: Evolutionary narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and nineteenth-century fiction

Gillian Beer's landmark book demonstrates how Darwin overturned fundamental cultural assumptions in his narratives, how George Eliot, Thomas Hardy and other writers pursued and resisted their contradictory implications, and how the stories he produced about natural selection and the struggle for life now underpin our culture. This second edition incorporates a new preface by the author and a foreword by the distinguished American scholar George Levine.