Charles Darwin and the Victorian Pre-History of Climate Denial
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 8091077 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Allen Macduffie (corresponding author), Allen MacDuffie Allen MacDuffie |
| Year | 2018 |
| Volume | 60 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 543-543 |
| Publication date | 2018-01-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Victorian Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0042-5222 • E-ISSN: 1527-2052 |
| Publisher | Indiana University Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.2979/victorianstudies.60.4.02 |
| OpenAlex | W2905463020 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
| References cited | 10 |
Recent theorists of the response to anthropogenic climate change have focused on what Naomi Klein terms “soft denial”: the tendency to accept the scientific consensus while continuing to live as if it were not true. This essay contends that this divided state of mind can be tracked back to the nineteenth century: specifically, in the response to the new biological paradigm articulated most cogently by Charles Darwin in On the Origin of Species (1859). In what follows, I discuss this tension in relation to Victorian evolutionary discourse and in a number of key literary works of the period, including Alfred Tennyson’s In Memoriam (1850) and Idylls of the King (1859–85), H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895), and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899
Aesthetics · Art · Biology · Charles darwin · Darwin (ADL · Darwinism · Denial · Epistemology · Key (lock · Literature · Period (music · Psychoanalysis · Relation (database · Climate Change Communication and Perception · Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature · Ecology · Environmental Philosophy and Ethics · History · Philosophy · Psychology
| Citations per year | 0.5 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2022 - 2026 (5) |
| Highly cited | No |