Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-rcrh6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-27T09:29:00.901Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Why Beauty Matters

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 December 2018

George Levine
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

For those of us for whom “literary Darwinism,” which bases its “scientific” approach to literary criticism on evolutionary psychology, has seemed an intellectual disaster, but who continue to believe that it is important to incorporate science cooperatively into our study of literature; for those who are concerned about how art and literature matter in a world so troubled and dangerous; for those convinced Darwinians who find themselves skeptical about and uneasy with the mechanico-materialist version of Darwinism that Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett have made popular; for those who find that the science they credit is yet inadequately attentive to women's perspectives, Richard Prum's The Evolution of Beauty offers a potentially marvelous option. A distinguished ornithologist, Prum has undertaken an enormously ambitious project, whose implications run from evolutionary biology to aesthetics. From the perspective of a very unscientific literary guy and a wannabe birder, I slightly distrust my enthusiasm for the book. But Prum's arguments are creatively provocative and brilliantly argued, even when they get rather iffily hypothetical; his ornithological studies are intrinsically fascinating, even to nonbirders, and at the same time they have potentially transformative implications. What he has to say, even if his inferences can and should be challenged, deserves the most serious engagement.

Type
Reviews
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 47 , Issue 1 , Spring 2019 , pp. 243 - 265
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Darwin, Charles. The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, 1860. Vol. 8. Edited by Burkhardt, Frederick et al. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.Google Scholar
Darwin, Charles. On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (1859). Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1964.Google Scholar
Darwin, Charles. The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871). Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981.Google Scholar
Dawkins, Richard. The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design. New York: W. W Norton, 1987.Google Scholar
Dennett, Daniel. Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meaning of Life. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995.Google Scholar
Endersby, Jim. “Darwin on Generation, Pangenesis, and sexual selection,” in The Cambridge Companion to Darwin. 2nd edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.Google Scholar
Flannery, Tim. “Objectifying Male Birds.” New York Review of Books, December 21, 2017, 20–22.Google Scholar
Grosz, Elizabeth Richard. Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflections on Life, Politics, and Art. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011.Google Scholar
Grosz, Elizabeth Richard. The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004.Google Scholar
Kramnick, Jonathan. “Against Literary Darwinism.” Critical Inquiry 37, no. 2 (Winter 2011): 315–47.Google Scholar
Levine, George. Darwin the Writer. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.Google Scholar
Prum, Richard. “Coevolutionary aesthetics in human and biotic artworlds.” Biology and Philosophy, (2013) 28:811–32.Google Scholar
Prum, Richard. The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin’s Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World and Us. New York: Doubleday, 2017.Google Scholar
Richards, Evelleen. Darwin and the Making of Sexual Selection. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017.Google Scholar
Richards, Robert. “Darwin's Theory of Natural Selection and its Moral Purpose.” The Cambridge Companion to “The Origin of Species.” Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.Google Scholar
Riskin, Jessica. The Restless Clock: A History of the Centuries-Long Argument over what Makes Living Things Tick. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016.Google Scholar
Turner, J. Scott. Purpose and Desire: What Makes Something “Alive” and Why Modern Darwinism has Failed to Explain it. New York: HarperOne, 2017.Google Scholar
Wallace, A. R. Darwinism: An Exposition of the Theory of Natural Selection, With Some of its Applications (1889). London: Macmillan, 1912.Google Scholar