French Literature Reviews - 2026

A. Neill. Human Evolution and Fantastic Victorian Fiction
Novel and Narrative Prose

Human Evolution and Fantastic Victorian Fiction

Anna Neill

ISBN 9780367722814

Routledge

182 Pages

£120.00

OVERVIEW

Following the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, Victorian anthropology advanced two seemingly contradictory propositions: it distinguished "civilized man" from animals and "primitive" humans, while simultaneously connecting them through common descent. Paradoxically, by situating human history within a deep past shaped by minute, incremental changes—rather than at the apex of a providential order—evolutionary anthropology was able to assert a novel form of human exceptionalism, defining civilized humanity in opposition to both human and non-human savagery.

This book demonstrates how fantastic Victorian and early Edwardian literature—including utopias, dystopias, nonsense writing, gothic horror, and children’s fables—liberates human and non-human animal agency from this increasingly orthodox narrative of deep time. By imagining worlds that dissolve evolutionary constraints on development and by compressing evolution into lived historical time, these narratives uncover (and even inhabit) dynamic landscapes of cognitive regression that challenge prevailing anthropological dogmas concerning race, culture, and species boundaries.

Table of Contents:

- Chapter One

Introduction: Strange Stories and the Descent of Mind

- Chapter Two

Phylogeny Recapitulates Ontogeny: Fantastic Evolution and Fairy Science in The Water-Babies

- Chapter Three

Developmental Nonsense in the Alice Tales

- Chapter Four

Orality, Print, and Evolution in the Just So Stories

- Chapter Five

Becoming Animal in The Island of Doctor Moreau

- Chapter Six

The Machinate Literary Mammal: Samuel Butler’s Strange Stories

- Chapter Seven

Exotic Geography, Natural Religion, and the Liberal Case against Eugenics in Flatland

- Chapter Eight

Deep Time and the Socialist Utopia

Coda

Shallowing the Past

Following Charles Darwin’s groundbreaking work, the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw intense debate over the place of humanity in the natural world. While scientific orthodoxy sought to classify and separate the civilized from the primitive, imaginative writers used speculative genres to disrupt these rigid hierarchies. By analyzing works ranging from Lewis Carroll’s Alice books to H.G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau, Anna Neill situates these literary texts within the broader history of science. She demonstrates how fiction became a vital space for questioning the linear, progressive narratives of evolutionary anthropology and exploring the fluid boundaries between human and animal.

This study offers valuable insights into how Victorian nonsense, gothic horror, and utopian fiction actively engaged with contemporary debates on eugenics, social reform, and developmental psychology. By examining how authors like Samuel Butler, Rudyard Kipling, and Edwin A. Abbott compressed deep time and imagined cognitive regression, the book addresses fundamental questions about the relationship between scientific discourse and literary creativity. It is an essential resource for scholars and students of Victorian literature, the history of science, and posthumanist theory, as well as anyone interested in the cultural impact of evolutionary theory.