Gillian Beer

Darwin's Plots is a fascinating piece of literary criticism, showing both how Darwin was influenced by literature and how literature was influence Darwin. The way Beer draws out the literary components of Darwin's writing-- not something it's normally read for-- is great, though I find claims along the lines of "Darwin learned to view historical time thanks to reading Shakespeare's history plays" a little specious. The revealing of the evolutionary narrative in George Eliot's fiction show more comprises the bulk of the book, and was also its strongest part-- might have been ever better if I'd ever read Daniel Deronda. (Beer doesn't really talk about Adam Bede, unfortunately, but I can easily see how the same ideas would apply.) Thomas Hardy caps off the book for good measure. A third edition came out last year; if I want to do what I claim I want to do, I need to get hold of this book. (An added bonus is that this book totally kills David Sloan Wilson's claim in Evolution for Everyone that literary critics refuse to allow the use of evolutionary theory, which I had thought was suspect to begin with.)

added June 2014:
Early in my graduate school career I read the first edition of this; now I read the third for my generals. (There are no differences of substance, just a new preface for the second edition and a bonus essay for the third.) It's an excellent (dare I say seminal?) piece of literary criticism, forming a triumvirate with the works of Levine and Shuttleworth (though it's perhaps the one of three least directly relevant to my own research). The thing Beer does really well and importantly is treat Darwin's own writings as something worthy of literary study, not just historical documents. show less