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Vaclav Paris
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The Evolutions of Modernist Epic

The Evolutions of
Modernist Epic
VÁCLAV PARIS
Assistant Professor
City College of New York, CUNY
1
3
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Acknowledgments
This book is a mongrel. Its evolutions have been long and strange and many
parents have put something into the mix. Thank you:
First to the academic grandfathers of this project: my dissertation advisors
at the University of Pennsylvania. To Jean-Michel Rabaté, Paul Saint-
Amour, and Charles Bernstein I owe more than I realized as a student.
Every word has changed since then, but it is no less indebted to your
generous guidance.
Then to my colleagues and students at City College New York. Thank you
especially to Liz Mazzola, to Yana Joseph, and to the much missed Rosaymi
Santos for making it possible for me to take time away to finish this book.
Thank you to all those who read or listened to early versions of various
parts of this book and offered their valuable feedback: Mikhal Dekel, Hap
Veeser, Robert Higney, Dan Gustafson, András Kiséry, Fuson Wang,
Lindsey Goss, Andreas Killen, Matt Hart, and the Columbia 20/21
Colloquium, Sarah Cole, Rebecca Walkowitz, Carolina Dos Santos,
Luciano Nuzzo, Cecilia Velázquez, Peter Steiner, Franta Podhajský and the
Brno Narratological Circle, Jonathan Goldman and the New York
Modernisms Group, Christopher Harwood and the Columbia Czech
Studies Colloquium, Barry McCrea, Fritz Senn, Sabrina Alonso, Ruth
Frenner, Ursula Zeller and the folk at the Zürich James Joyce Foundation,
John McCourt, Laura Pelaschiar, Sebastian Knowles, and the Trieste James
Joyce School, attendees at various MSA conferences, and many others.
For seminal conversations about epic and evolution, going way back, my
thanks to: Bob Perelman, Rachel Blau-Duplessis, Edward Burns, Michael
Golston, Heather Love, Jed Esty, Caroline Henze-Gongola, John Paetsch,
Jess Cross, Astrid Lorange, Gabriel Sessions, Robert Turner, Robert Tucker,
Aman Anand, Scarlett Baron, René Weis, and Peter Swaab. Thank you also
to the late Leon Katz, who, apart from offering me his advice, also very
generously made available to me his work on Gertrude Stein’s unpublished
manuscripts and notebooks.
Over the years, my research was supported by fellowships from the
National Endowment for the Humanities, the Zürich James Joyce
Foundation, the CUNY Faculty Fellowship Publication Program, several
vi 
Rifkind Foundation grants, and several PSC-CUNY Awards, jointly funded

by Professional Staff Congress and The City University of New York. I am
very grateful for this support.
A version of the fourth chapter of this book, titled “The Nature of
Comparison: Macunaíma and Orlando,” appears in Comparative
Literature Studies 57.1, Copyright © 2020, Penn State University Press.
This article is used by permission of The Pennsylvania State University
Press. An early and much shorter version of the first chapter titled
“Beginning Again with Modernist Epic” was first published in Modernism/
modernity’s Print Plus 1.3 (2016). Copyright © 2016 Johns Hopkins
University Press. Reprinted with permission by Johns Hopkins University
Press. I am grateful for permission to reuse this material here.
My appreciation goes to the anonymous reviewers of this book who
provided me with encouragement and trenchant suggestions. I am fortunate
to have found such excellent readers. Thanks also to Jacqueline Norton,
Martin Noble, and the superb editorial staff at Oxford University Press.
Thank you to Sophie Ziner for reading through and fixing my commas at a
crucial moment. And thank you Blake Henshaw for a last round of dazzling
commentaries that reopened everything.
Finally, thank you to my family. Thank you to my own progenitors, Alena
Vencovská and Jeff Paris: it was your care and love, your intellectual
brilliance, your zest for life that made anything possible. Thank you to my
wonderful in-laws, Marco and Giulietta, who have helped in a thousand
ways. Thank you to little Miranda for keeping me company while proofing
and indexing. And thank you to Agnese, for your never-faltering support,
your imagination, and your passions. Thank you for bringing joy to our lives
every day while this book was being written.
Contents
Introduction: By the Light of the Eclipse 1

1. Beginning Again with Modernist Epic: Gertrude Stein’s
The Making of Americans 40
2. Joyce’s Atavism and the New Ireland 70
3. Survival of the Unfittest on the Eastern Front: The Good
Soldier Švejk 101
4. Comparing Tales of the Tribe: Macunaíma and Orlando 137
Afterword: Beyond the Eclipse 167
Bibliography 179
Index 207
BY firm immutable immortal laws

Impress’d on Nature by the GREAT FIRST CAUSE,
Say, MUSE! how rose from elemental strife
Organic forms, and kindled into life . . .
—Erasmus Darwin, The Temple of Nature
Introduction
By the Light of the Eclipse
“I fear those big words,” says Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses, “which make us so
unhappy.”¹ Although it is not clear exactly which words he is referring to,
Stephen might well have said the same about the twin subjects of this book:
epic and evolution. Epic and evolution are two of the biggest words in the
English language. Both carry a monumental significance, opening onto
realms of the deep past, primal nature, and human destiny. But both also
carry the taint of association with reactionary and racist political programs.
Throughout modern history the stakes of their interpretation and coordin-
ation have been high—at no moment more so than during the decades when
Joyce was writing.
This book tells the story of the early twentieth-century encounter between
epic and evolution. Each of its four chapters focuses on one or two innova-
tive literary works from different national settings: the United States,
Ireland, Czechoslovakia, England, and Brazil. In tracing the interaction
between epic and evolution across this geographically extended range of
texts, its principal aim is to scope out a new approach to comparative
modernism. For a long time, the dominant method for narrating modernism
across borders was through broadly Marxist vocabularies. It was presented
as a subclass of Weltliteratur—a result of capitalist development, cosmopol-
itanism, and the decline of the nation-state.² Often, like a big corporation, it
¹ James Joyce, Ulysses (New York: Vintage, 1993), 26. Stephen is responding to Mr Deasy’s
admonishment that “We are a generous people, but we must also be just,” and so in the
immediate context, the “big words” are apparently “just” and “generous.” But as we will see
in Chapter 2, epic and evolution are also at stake in Stephen’s discussion with Deasy.
² Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels predicted the rise of Weltliteratur in the Communist
Manifesto (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 77. Studies of modernism influenced by
their vision include: Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of
Modernity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982); Jessica Berman, Modernist Fiction,
Cosmopolitanism, and the Politics of Community (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2006); Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans. M. B. DeBevoise (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); Franco Moretti, Modern Epic: The World-System from
Goethe to García Márquez (London: Verso, 1996); Jahan Ramazani, A Transnational Poetics
The Evolutions of Modernist Epic. Václav Paris, Oxford University Press (2021). © Václav Paris.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198868217.003.0001
2     
was referred to as transnational. More recently, this political-economic

paradigm has been tempered with ecocritical, biopolitical, and neo-
materialist approaches. Modernism is seen as entailed on a planetary
modernity—a modernity characterized as much by changes in the physical
and natural world as by uneven development. And modernist writing, we
are told, contains resources for thinking about climate change and ecology,
about posthumanism and the anthropocene.³
For these approaches, Darwin is as fundamental as Marx. In this regard,
they are consonant with the present study. At the same time, there are
aspects of the period’s writing that remain largely neglected. In particular,
in their anti-anthropocentric bent, environmentally oriented readings of
modernism have left almost unnoticed what we might call human biological
history. Homo sapiens may, in the wake of Darwin’s theories, have lost its
exceptionality, becoming one animal among others. And culture may have
taken a long time to come to terms with this, as Freud warned. But the
human being, and its narratives, also changed as a result, and changed in
ways that were more creative, more diverse, and queerer than we appreciate.
In this sense, turn-of-the-century modernity stands to be understood as an
event in the shared life of humans, and modernism as shaped by, and
shaping, this event.
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); and Rebecca L. Walkowitz, Cosmopolitan Style:
Modernism Beyond the Nation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006). For discussions of
the intersection between world literature and global modernism, see Peter J. Kalliney,
Modernism in a Global Context (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), Aarthi Vadde,
Chimeras of Form: Modernist Internationalism Beyond Europe, 1914–2016 (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2016); and Susan Stanford Friedman, “World Modernisms,
World Literature, and Comparativity,” in The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms, ed.
Mark A. Wollaeger and Matt Eatough (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 499–528.
³ In Planetary Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity Across Time (New York: Columbia

University Press, 2015), 495, Susan Stanford Friedman calls for a perspective that includes “a
consciousness of the earth as planet, not restricted to geopolitical formations and potentially
encompassing the nonhuman as well as the human.” A seminal essay exploring the possibility of
mapping modernity onto the anthropocene is Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History:
Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry 35, no. 2 (2009): 197–222. For an overview of recent treatments of
modernism and ecocriticism, see Anne Raine, “Ecocriticism and Modernism,” in The Oxford
Handbook of Ecocriticism, ed. Greg Garrard (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press,
2014). For specific studies, see inter alia, Matthew Griffiths, The New Poetics of Climate Change:
Modernist Aesthetics for a Warming World (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017); Alison
Lacivita, The Ecology of Finnegans Wake (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2015); Joshua
Schuster, The Ecology of Modernism: American Environments and Avant-Garde Poetics
(Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2015); and Jesse O. Taylor, The Sky of Our
Manufacture: The London Fog and British Fiction from Dickens to Woolf (Charlottesville:
University of Virginia Press, 2016).
:       3
How can we approach modernism as a consequence not just of globalization,

but also, at the same time, of changing conceptions of the species, of
biological and group identity, and everyday life and survival? To what extent
were modernism’s economic, political, and ecological dimensions subtended
by broadly Darwinian narratives? And to what degree was the phenomenon
motivated by debates over, for instance, vitalism, nativism, and sexual
reproduction? Thinking through one of the period’s defining genres, the
prose epic, the following pages will tackle these questions.
Apart from promoting a fresh conversation about modernism’s involve-
ment with Darwin’s legacy, this book has a more specific consequence for
comparative approaches to the period’s literature. Addressing modernism’s
biocentric side asks us to think more carefully about its entanglement in
supposedly organic networks, its own entangled banks. The epic fictions
considered here conceive human collectivities (of which the nation is the
largest and most important) as themselves potentially natural modes of
organization and hence also evolving subjects in need of more careful
consideration. These nations may not be predetermined or self-sufficient
tribal wholes, but since they are, in complex and vital ways, present in the
very language that the texts are written in, we cannot dismiss them or even
easily step outside of them in our reading. Resisting the tendency to interpret
different modernist texts as parallel expressions of a postnational republic of
letters or posthuman geography, the current project tests out a method that
allows us to account for these odd variable frames and modernist literature’s
work on them. Attending to epic’s involvement with evolution, it helps ideas
of organic or romantic nationhood come into focus as an important and
overlooked creative factor for the period’s literature.
Between the Scylla of Two Cultures and the

Charybdis of Consilience
But in order to arrive at this book’s take on comparative modernism and

planetary modernity, we need first to trace out, more generally, how the
discussion will coordinate literature and science, genre and species. This will
also introduce a broad secondary goal of the study: to foster what Angus
Fletcher calls “another” and better literary Darwinism.⁴
⁴ See Angus Fletcher, “Another Literary Darwinism,” Critical Inquiry 40, no. 2 (January 1,
2014): 450–69.
4     
Our course is set between two opposing standpoints on the question of

the relation of epic to evolution. On one side is the overlook routinely
assumed by students of literary history as well as by most students of
evolutionary thought. Within standard introductions to either discipline,
epic and evolution have almost nothing in common. Where the first, strictly
speaking, designates a narrative genre of classical antiquity, the second
nominates a set of processes, discovered in the nineteenth century, by
which, over the course of multiple generations, a species changes.⁵ Where
epic is a human product, evolution is natural: it stands to be examined not in
the works of imaginative literature, but in the laboratories and fieldwork of
embryologists, paleontologists, entomologists, statisticians, geneticists and
so forth. And where epic is mythological, evolution is empirical. The two
belong, in short, to what Stephen Jay Gould called “nonoverlapping magis-
teria” of experience.⁶
On the other side is a group of thinkers who believe that evolution and
epic have almost everything to do with each other, that the two terms fold
into each other. For evolution, presented as a set of discrete data from many
different fields, is not particularly meaningful. Some kind of narrative
transmission is always required. Along these lines, the American biologist
E. O. Wilson conjectured that evolution, as we know it, is best conceived as
itself an epic. As he writes in his 1978 study On Human Nature: “[T]he
evolutionary epic is probably the best myth we will ever have.”⁷ Wilson’s
idea is that human beings have a primal need for explanations of their
existence, a need better served by scientific materialism than religion. Epic
provides an appropriate, secular, container for these explanations. It can
accommodate this cosmically comprehensive subject, including its ventures
into the unknown. And it can present it in ways that scientists alone are
unable. For, as Wilson claims, quoting J. B. S. Haldane, “scientific men as a
class are devoid of any perception of literary form,” just as the “high culture”
and “great writers” of “Western Civilization” exist “largely apart from the
natural sciences.”⁸ In the evolutionary epic, these two can meet, forming a
⁵ “Evolution” will be used here in the extensive sense, originally promoted by Herbert
Spencer, and only later adopted by Charles Darwin. See Stephen Jay Gould, Full House:
The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2011), 137.
⁶ Stephen Jay Gould, “Nonoverlapping Magisteria” in Leonardo’s Mountain of Clams and the
Diet of Worms (New York: Harmony Books, 1998), 269–83.
⁷ Edward O. Wilson, On Human Nature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2004), 201.
⁸ Wilson, On Human Nature, 202.
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base for what he calls a “new synthesis” between the sciences and the
humanities.⁹ It is with this hope that Wilson’s idea has been extensively
taken up, spawning a field of sociobiology known as “Epic of Evolution.”¹⁰
For many sociobiologists, epic and evolution are consilient. Although one
pertains to the humanities, the other to the sciences, their findings and
structure agree, revealing a larger “unity of knowledge.”¹¹ In order to
demonstrate this consilience, sociobiologists reduce both terms, and then
fit them into each other. So, in On Human Nature, evolution is condensed to
a single chain of causes and effects. Epic is cast as a unidirectional mono-
myth. The two are described in ways that are similar, and then presented as
effectively the same thing. In the work of several of Wilson’s followers, an
analogous reduction applies the other way around. The story told by any
particular epic, and of epics in general, is abstracted to an adaptationist
view of human life, and thereby fitted into a larger account of human
evolution. “Epic,” according to Frederick Turner, “is the basic story that
the human species tells to itself about itself . . . an accurate description of the
evolution of the human species seen from the inside and half-remembered
in the most graphic and intuitive language.”¹² Thanks to its primal and
ostensibly universal qualities, epic can be understood to mediate human
evolution. As Jonathan Gottschal explains, when read through sociobiological
⁹ “New Synthesis”—a term reprised from Julian Huxley’s 1942 Evolution: The Darwinian
Synthesis (to which I will turn below)—appears in the title of Wilson’s earlier seminal
work, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University
Press, 2002).
¹⁰ Like Wilson, Richard Dawkins sees the evolutionary narrative of “Mitochondrial Eve” as
“a grander and incomparably more ancient epic” than Genesis (River Out of Eden: A Darwinian
View of Life [London: Phoenix, 1996], 66). For Wilson’s influence on Literary Darwinism and
Evolutionary Psychology, see Jonathan Kramnick, “Against Literary Darwinism,” Critical
Inquiry 37, no. 2 (2011): 315–47. For works associated with the field of “Epic of Evolution”
see for instance, Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry, The Universe Story (London: Arkana, 1994);
Ursula Goodenough, The Sacred Depths of Nature (Cambridge: International Society for Science
and Religion, 2007); Loyal D. Rue, Everybody’s Story: Wising up to the Epic of Evolution (Albany:
State University of New York Press, 2000); Eric Chaisson, Epic of Evolution: Seven Ages of the
Cosmos (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006).
¹¹ For related discussions of consilience, see Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of
Knowledge (London: Abacus, 2010); Edward G. Slingerland and Mark Collard, eds., Creating
Consilience: Integrating the Sciences and the Humanities (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2012); Joseph Carroll, Dan P. McAdams, and Edward O. Wilson, eds., Darwin’s Bridge: Uniting
the Humanities and Sciences, 2016.
¹² Frederick Turner, Epic: Form, Content, and History (New Brunswick: Transaction
Publishers, 2012), 13.
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hermeneutics, the Iliad comes into focus as “a drama of naked apes”

competing with each other for survival and for female mates.¹³ Homer’s
poem is evolution in action.
There are hazards on both sides—both with assuming that evolution and
epic have nothing to do with each other, and with assuming that they are
straightforwardly consilient. The problem with assuming that they belong to
separate spheres is that—historically at least—this is not quite true. Early
articulations of evolution were often framed by epic. Epic poets—Hesiod,
Ovid, or Lucretius—addressed evolutionary themes in detail. And for many
centuries, it was common for natural philosophers to use epic as basis for
understanding, allegorically, the origins and organization of life.¹⁴ This
affinity between epic and evolution was still current in the nineteenth
century when Erasmus Darwin opened his Temple of Nature by combining
an invocation of the muse with natural law: “Say, MUSE! how rose from
elemental strife / Organic forms, and kindled into life . . . ”¹⁵ To Erasmus
Darwin, epic provided a charter for his considerations about the natural
world. A similar observation can be made of many of Erasmus Darwin’s
contemporaries and followers, not just epic poets per se (Goethe, Tennyson,
Mathilde Blind, Whitman, for example), but also authors of essayistic
works, such as Winwood Reade, Robert Chambers, Hugh Miller, Richard
Owen, Herbert Spencer, Ernst Haeckel, Edwin Ray Lankester, and Benjamin
Kidd.¹⁶ “The epic,” as David Amigoni and James Elwick put it, “came first,
¹³ Jonathan Gottschall and David Sloan Wilson, “Introduction: Literature—A Last Frontier
in Human Evolutionary Studies,” in The Literary Animal: Evolution and the Nature of Narrative
(Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2005), xviii. “Naked apes” is a reference to
Desmond Morris’s popular behaviorist work, The Naked Ape: A Zoologist’s Study of the
Human Animal (New York: Delta Trade Paperbacks, 1999). For a fuller version of this kind
of reading of classical epic, see Jonathan Gottschall, The Rape of Troy: Evolution, Violence, and
the World of Homer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). For another approach to
epic within The Literary Animal, see Robin Fox, “Male Bonding in the Epics and Romances”
126–46. See also Clinton Machann, Masculinity in Four Victorian Epics: A Darwinist Reading
(Farnham: Ashgate, 2010).
¹⁴ See, among others, Pierre Hadot, The Veil of Isis: An Essay on the History of Idea of Nature,
trans. Michael Chase (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006);
Zdeněk Kratochvíl, The Philosophy of Living Nature, trans. Václav Paris (Prague: Karolínum
Press, 2016), and Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1948).
¹⁵ Erasmus Darwin, The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society. A Poem with
Philosophical Notes (Baltimore: John W. Butler, 1804), 9.
¹⁶ James Secord makes this point in relation to Robert Chambers in Victorian Sensation: The
Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of
Creation (Chicago, IL; London: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 461. See also Devin
C. Griffiths, The Age of Analogy: Science and Literature Between the Darwins (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016); Lionel Stevenson, Darwin Among the Poets
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and information about evolution was inserted into it: that is, the very form of
the epic itself organized and presented knowledge about evolution in a story-
shaped manner.”¹⁷
Even Erasmus’s prodigious grandson—Charles—came to his notions of
evolution, at least in part, by way of an epic view of the world. When
voyaging on the Beagle, his “chief favorite” reading material was Milton’s
Paradise Lost; when he returned it was Wordsworth’s Excursion.¹⁸ As a
preexisting medium for telling history in the longue durée, origin stories,
collective identity, and aetiology, epic provided him with a conceptual
architecture, register, and encyclopedic scope for a new foundation narra-
tive. So, in the Origin of Species, we meet the (often capitalized) Natural
Selection playing the role of deity or divine machinery, and Man as a kind of
epic hero.¹⁹ And in the final peroration, it is the Miltonic mood that
triumphs: “There is,” writes Darwin, “grandeur in this view of life, with
its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into
one . . . ”²⁰
At the same time, it is a mistake to assume that since evolution and epic
had a close relationship in the nineteenth century therefore epic reduces to
an expression of evolution or that evolution is best understood as a blank
slate epic. Critics of sociobiology have been quick to show that this kind of
reduction skews our understanding of both epic and evolution and the
worlds that they describe. In political terms, such an approach to the
(New York: Russell & Russell, 1963); Frederick William Conner, Cosmic Optimism: A Study of
the Interpretation of Evolution by American Poets from Emerson to Robinson (Gainesville:
University of Florida Press, 1949); John Holmes, Darwin’s Bards: British and American Poetry
in the Age of Evolution (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009).
¹⁷ David Amigoni and James Elwick, The Evolutionary Epic (London: Pickering & Chatto,
2011), xiii.
¹⁸ Charles Darwin, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, 1809–1882, ed. Nora Barlow (New
York: Harcourt, Brace, 1958), 85. For Darwin’s “Miltonic ambitions” see George Levine, Darwin
the Writer (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 26.
¹⁹ William J. Scheick, “Epic Traces in Darwin’s Origin of Species,” South Atlantic Quarterly 72
(1973): 274.
²⁰ Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation
of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (London: John Murray, 1859), 491. It is significant that
already by 1860 Darwin had adapted this ending to include the words “by the Creator” after
“originally breathed.” Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2008), 360. For the suggestion that “grandeur” is, transculturally, epic’s defining feature,
see Masaki Mori, Epic Grandeur: Toward a Comparative Poetics of the Epic (Albany: State
University of New York Press, 1997). On the epic quality of Darwin’s last paragraph, see David
Amigoni, “Evolution,” in Routledge Companion to Literature and Science, ed. Bruce B. Clarke
and Manuela Rossini (London; New York: Routledge, 2012), 119, and Venla Oikkonen, Gender,
Sexuality and Reproduction in Evolutionary Narratives (New York: Routledge, 2013), 25.
8     
evolutionary epic tends to render natural history as winner’s history,

affirming the “gladiatorial theory of existence” always only in service of a
dominant class. (Sociobiology, writes Michael Berubé, implies “that Nature
herself speaks the language of Ayn Rand.”)²¹ It naturalizes binary gender
roles, excuses rape, and leaves little space for queer or non-reproductive
individuals. It casts all culture as caveman nature, and all literature as
storytelling. And it produces an impoverished representation of the diversity
of evolutionary processes.²² I mean not only that its thin description pays
too little attention to specific contexts, or that its emphasis on adaptation
tends to neglect exaptation, altruism, and symbiosis, but also that—in search-
ing for a too easy settlement between the scientific data of evolution and its
cultural mediation—it ignores the generative friction between the two.
Accordingly, the current project sets its course between the Scylla of
assuming that evolution and epic have nothing to do with each other, and
the Charybdis of conflating them under the banner of consilience. As this
book will show, epic and evolution have had a much more interesting
relationship than either standpoint admits. Over the last two centuries,
they have informed each other, but they have also, at various moments,
challenged and changed each other.
In order to pick at the knotted keywords in this book’s title, we will
approach them neither as mutually exclusive nor as consilient, but more in
the way scholars of science studies teach us to construe the interaction
between scientific advances and their mediation. Bruno Latour offers one
example of this kind of interaction while describing an exhibition on the
evolution of horses titled “A Textbook Case Revisited.” The exhibition, held
at the Natural History Museum in New York, sought to show how inter-
pretations of equine evolution had changed over the preceding 150 years.
Latour’s appreciation of this exhibition is based on his understanding that
narratives of evolution often substantialize the very history they are
²¹ Qtd. in Jonathan Greenberg, “Introduction: Darwin and Literary Studies,” Twentieth

Century Literature 55, no. 4 (December 1, 2009): 426. “Gladiatorial theory of existence” is
T. H. Huxley’s expression. He used it while urging his contemporaries to repudiate survival of
the fittest as a model for human society and civilization. Evolution and Ethics: And Other Essays
(London: Macmillan, 1894), 82.
²² For feminist and queer critiques of sociobiology, including its rhetorical use of epic, see
Oikkonen, Gender, Sexuality and Reproduction in Evolutionary Narratives and Martha
McCaughey, The Caveman Mystique: Pop-Darwinism and the Debates over Sex, Violence, and
Science (New York: Routledge, 2008). For an influential objection to its adaptationism, see
Stephen Jay Gould and R. C. Lewontin “The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian
Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme,” Proceedings of the Royal Society of
London. Series B, Biological Sciences 205, no. 1161 (1979): 581–98.
:       9
describing. In this exhibition there was, Latour writes, “a parallel, a common

thrust or pattern, between the slow, hesitant, and bushy movement of the
various sorts of horses struggling for life in the course of their evolution, and
the slow, hesitant, and bushy process by which scientists have reconstructed
the evolution of the horses in the course of the history of paleontology.”²³
This parallel is important because, for Latour, evolution is always already
social, that is, socially embedded (not, I hasten to add, socially constructed).
The form of its presentation interprets and gives meaning to the content,
adding something to the content that was not there before, but which is no
longer separable afterwards. For this reason, the story of evolution is also, as
the exhibition made clear, always in creative relation to the story of the
evolution of its own narrations. And consequently, as Latour writes else-
where, the necessity is always for originality: “The ‘new alliance’ between
science and culture cannot be so quick and cheap.” The “subject evolution
has many more degrees of freedom than our representations of it” and
“every species forces the natural historian to take as much risk to account
for its evolution through an innovative form of narration as it took the
species to survive.”²⁴ Beyond the lowest-resolution accounts, we might say,
evolution is always avant-garde.
Following Latour’s thread, this book proposes not only to reread literary
modernism through a comparative perspective that includes the history of
science, but also—on the flipside—to use literary modernism as a privileged
medium for establishing that perspective. That is, by reconsidering the
intersection of epic and evolution as a potential meeting place for the two
cultures, it promises both a new approach to the epic in late modernity, and
a fresh approach to the place of evolution in modern literature. Modernism
is, in this sense, a useful locus for thickening the kind of too “quick and
cheap” fusion seen in sociobiology. As we will see, new literature in this
period experimented with national epic precisely as a space for problem-
atizing and reimagining social Darwinism.
²³ Bruno Latour, “A Textbook Case Revisited: Knowledge as Mode of Existence,” in The

Handbook of Science and Technology Studies, ed. Edward J. Hackett et al. (Cambridge, MA;
London: MIT Press, 2008), 86.
²⁴ Bruno Latour, “Foreword: Stengers’s Shibboleth,” in Power and Invention: Situating
Science, by Isabelle Stengers (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), x, xvi.
10     
Overview of the Chapters
The base for this book’s analysis of epic and evolution is a constellation of
five texts, chosen because they illuminate the modernist encounter
between epic and evolution particularly well. Gertrude Stein’s The
Making of Americans (begun in 1902, published in 1925) starts off as a
family saga but then departs strikingly from any established style. James
Joyce’s Ulysses (begun in 1914, published in 1922) brings Ireland to life not
by reducing it to a single definitive identity, but accretively, experimentally
finding ways to add to the genetic mix. Like Stein’s and Joyce’s works,
Jaroslav Hašek’s The Good Soldier Švejk (1921–23) has become a founda-
tional text not by inhabiting a tradition or convention, but by a kind of
usurpation and redefinition. Unlike its English language counterparts,
however, it has rarely been linked to the larger revolution in the arts
known as modernism. Virginia Woolf ’s Orlando and Mário de
Andrade’s Macunaíma, both picaresque narratives published in 1928,
luxuriate in extravagant linguistic play and queer eroticism, and end with
a reference to the moment of narration, which frames them as odd
rhapsodic performances. Each of these peculiar prose narratives is a
reinterpretation of the national epic in relation to contemporary
Darwinian and post-Darwinian understandings of evolution. As the refer-
ences to many other epic works from the period are meant to suggest, they
are entry points into a larger potential comparative modernism rather than
a representative sample.
By reading this particular selection of works in the order they were
written in, this book tells a version of the story of epic and evolution from
before the First World War to the rise of European fascism. With this
chronological movement, the book will also spread out in terms of geo-
graphical range, to include Czechoslovakia and—in the last chapter—a
Brazilian work alongside a canonical English text. The purpose is to dem-
onstrate how epic fiction participated in the social interpretation of
Darwinism in analogous ways in different parts of the world, revealing
this interpretation to be a key factor in the development of the genre
globally, one that bridged high modernist national narrative and its con-
temporary postcolonial equivalents. In this regard, the choice of texts is
designed to help fill in part of the aforementioned critical blindspot around
global modernism’s organic nationalisms. For although The Making of
Americans, Ulysses, Švejk, Orlando, and Macunaíma have many common
features and emphases, the historical connections between them remain
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obscure. No one has yet explained why they emerged, in different places, and
apparently independently, in the same decade.
The first chapter, concerned with Gertrude Stein’s The Making of
Americans, offers a revisionary account of the emergence of modernist
epic. Stein’s book is a clear example of how modernist writers were motiv-
ated to experimental narrative forms by overwriting and complicating what
had, for many, become a hegemonic view of evolutionary descent. In the late
nineteenth-century United States, the prevailing paradigm for secular nar-
rations of national destiny, as in say, Frederick Jackson Turner’s “Frontier
Thesis” or Theodore Roosevelt’s “Strenuous Life” was the idea of survival of
the fittest. While Darwin would not have promoted this application of his
theory, it was associated with him, and his published writings do offer a basis
for it. It is implicit already in the full title of On the Origin of Species, or the
Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle of Life. It is also touched on
more explicitly in The Descent of Man, where, citing his eugenicist cousin
Mr Galton, the naturalist writes that: “There is apparently much truth in the
belief that the wonderful progress of the United States, as well as the
character of the people, are the results of natural selection; the more
energetic, restless, and courageous men from all parts of Europe having
emigrated during the last ten or twelve generations to that great country, and
having there succeeded best.”²⁵
Mostly written between 1902 and 1911, Gertrude Stein’s The Making of
Americans opens as if it were in agreement with such Darwinist narrations
of the American history. She announces it as a developmental narrative of
the United States, tracing two families’ progressions and westward move-
ment, from a first generation of immigrants to their children and then
grandchildren. Americans, however, does not fulfil its developmentalist
prospects. Rather, the book stalls, digresses, and—in Stein’s words—“begins
again and again.” Often Stein repeats herself, circling around the same
events. And even more often, she simply details the types of different figures
in her book, indexing their qualities and habits. In its final three hundred
pages, enumerating the everyday activities of David Hersland, the chron-
otope of Stein’s narrative, as Tim Armstrong suggests, comes to resemble
less the work of nineteenth-century historians or the conventional historical
novel, than the enormously extensive later portions of modernist epic works
such as Musil’s The Man Without Qualities, Proust’s Recherche, or Joyce’s
²⁵ Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, vol. 1 (London: John
Murray, 1871), 179.
12     
Ulysses – and also, one might add, Thomas Mann’s or Virginia Woolf ’s
efforts to narrate nothing but the passing of time in The Magic Mountain
and To the Lighthouse respectively.²⁶ In order to explain the shift that occurs
over the course of The Making of Americans, the first chapter shows how
Stein’s turn to a digressive open-form narrative corresponds to her changing
interests in biological science. The interruption of the generational narrative
model marks Stein’s attempt, expressed both within and without the work,
to find a new way to represent American life and to write epic beyond a
“closed circle” of Darwinism and its hetero-patriarchal protocols.
Stein’s Americans suggests that the new form of national epic in mod-
ernism emerged through an engagement with evolutionary thought. This
understanding is confirmed and deepened through a reading of modern-
ism’s most celebrated prose epic, James Joyce’s Ulysses. As the second
chapter describes, Ulysses also begins as a national allegory. It is the story
of Stephen Dedalus escaping suitors to Ireland (such as the Englishman
Haines), to find a foster father in Leopold Bloom. In its anatomization of
Dublin, Ulysses offers a microcosmic view of the national situation—not just
the political situation, but also that of everyday life in Ireland, the embodied
processes through which history takes place.
In composing Ulysses, and in turning to the idea of epic, Joyce, like Stein,
was explicit about his general opposition to applied Darwinism. This resist-
ance has often been noted by his critics. Joyce, they point out, recognized
that social Darwinist hierarchies tended to cast Ireland as lower than
England, and that Ireland was by no means racially pure (notably in his
1907 essay, “Ireland: Isle of Saints and Sages”). Instead, therefore, he sought
other bases on which to define its lifeworld and to tell its story. The second
chapter establishes these other bases, pointing to their involvement with
vitalist and mythic modes of thinking about evolution in the early twentieth
century. In particular, this chapter takes up Joyce’s rejoinder to the idea of
epic as a stage for primitive masculine action and progressive evolutionary
history. Joyce’s reincarnation of Odysseus as the pacifist cuckold and “new
womanly man,” Mr Bloom, will be read in relation to a larger revaluing of
Darwinism and, specifically, ideas of atavism—both generic and national. By
writing an epic that brings back the ancient (Homeric) past as present in a
radically contemporary way in Irish modernity, Joyce restages and questions
²⁶ Tim Armstrong, “Modernist Temporality: The Science and Philosophy and Aesthetics of
Temporality from 1880,” in The Cambridge History of Modernism, ed. Vincent B. Sherry
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 32.
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the scientific understanding of atavism and its applications. Like Stein, Joyce
thus also forges his own form of modernist epic as a way of escaping a net of
reductive social Darwinism. Through the idiosyncratic vitalism of Ulysses,
he narrates Ireland as a living entity while deconstructing the racist and
abjecting categories applied to the Irish in his time.
Expanding the understandings of modernist epic developed in the first
two chapters, the third chapter moves beyond the world of anglophone
literature and the traditional limits of modernist studies. Focusing on
Jaroslav Hašek’s The Good Soldier Švejk, the chapter asks about how to
read modernist epic as responding to living history and fulfilling common
functions, against the limitations and exclusions of elitism. Soon after its
serial publication between 1921 and 1923, The Good Soldier Švejk achieved
iconic status in Czechoslovakia. Yet this new figurehead—the character Josef
Švejk—possesses none of the qualities we usually expect of an epic hero. He
is imbecilic, alcoholic, lazy, rheumatic, degenerate, and associated with the
mongrel dogs he sells. He speaks an impure colloquial version of the
national language. Indeed, his only clearly positive feature is how, ironically
because of his stupidity, he always manages to escape a terrible destiny,
delaying his arrival at the Eastern Front. How could Švejk be seen as a bearer
of the national epic?
Building on the readings in Chapters 1 and 2, the third chapter argues
that Švejk’s progress is best understood as an inversion of the winnowing
process of natural selection that thinkers such as Ernst Haeckel, and move-
ments such as Futurism, associated with the Great War. The story is a moral
of survival of the unfittest, a kind of reverse Darwin Award dramatizing how
the underdog can succeed in a violent world. Allegorically, it is also the story
of how the Czechs surfaced from under the Austrian empire. This reading
will show that although Hašek was not invested in any modernist move-
ment, and did not read Joyce or Stein, Proust or Musil, his text was
nevertheless shaped in relation to the same underlying historical forces. It
reveals, consequently, an encompassing context of evolutionary thought that
different national modernisms can be coordinated against, which also
crosses the cultural divide between high and low.
Completing the book’s chronological arc and geographical spread, the
fourth and final chapter compares two texts written in 1928, but in very
different settings: Mário de Andrade’s Macunaíma and Virginia Woolf ’s
Orlando. Both works narrate the history of their nations as embodied in one
unusual hero. Macunaíma tells the story of Brazil’s modernization; Orlando
begins in Elizabethan England and works its way up to the moment of
14     
composition. Although each is deeply idiosyncratic, they arrive at a similar

set of conceits for national figuration. Orlando famously changes sex half-
way through Woolf ’s narrative, while Macunaíma changes race, from black
to white. To make sense of the contiguities between Macunaíma and
Orlando, this chapter reads both as epics responding to the changing
discourse of large-scale social evolution in the 1920s. In particular, it points
out that both authors were aware of fascism’s increasingly rigid interpret-
ations of evolution’s significance. Both authors invert these interpretations
in similar ways. Macunaíma takes up the specific, and contemporary,
political problem of the racial constitution of Brazil. In order to represent
the diversity of Brazil’s lifeworld, and its capacity to change while maintain-
ing a singular identity, Andrade invents a character “without a character”—
i.e., without a genetic script. Woolf ’s concern, comparably, is with Victorian
representations of the nation as made up by its population and its gener-
ations, a representation she satirizes in the penultimate chapter of Orlando.
Drawing out the similarities between Andrade and Woolf ’s narratives, the
chapter explains how Macunaíma and Orlando exemplify and expand this
book’s methodology for reading modernist epic fiction comparatively
against changing perceptions of evolution. The chapter shows how such a
bifocal reading allows us to see connections across traditional disciplinary
boundaries of center and periphery, European and post-colonial.
Modernism and the Eclipse of Darwinism
Earlier I cited E. O. Wilson’s 1978 work On Human Nature. I then promised

that, in order to trouble sociobiology’s “too quick and cheap” settlement
between the two cultures, this book would, over the course of the coming
chapters, read a constellation of epic fictions published in the 1920s. But
how can such a constellation respond to a unification of the literary and
scientific half a century before that unification was proposed?
“One is amazed,” writes Lionel Stevenson in Darwin among the Poets, “to
discover how many of today’s new creeds and revised philosophies of life
were first proposed by Victorian poets.”²⁷ Wilson’s ideas are no exception.
Suggestions similar to the evolutionary epic as a response to the two culture
²⁷ Stevenson, Darwin among the Poets, 1.

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debate circulated throughout the later nineteenth century.²⁸ In particular, as

early critics of Wilson pointed out, his “new synthesis” shares much with
Herbert Spencer’s “old synthesis.”²⁹ Like Wilson, Spencer was in “no doubt”
that evolution constituted a kind of super epic.³⁰ Like Wilson, Spencer
occupied himself with establishing consilience between the biological sci-
ences and the social sciences. And like Wilson, he saw the basic dynamic for
achieving this synthesis in a static formula based on natural selection.³¹ In
Spencer’s philosophy, survival of the fittest provides the core motor towards
the production of ever more complex forms (and therefore of a kind of
“universal progress”) in all biological and social fields. Although Spencer’s
work is often hard to abstract, in this vitiated form, it was extremely popular.
In the nineteenth century, this idea ramified outwards, not only in the
voluminous works of Spencer himself, but also among many other thinkers,
including Ernst Haeckel, to provide a monistic understanding of the human-
ities, sciences, and the “riddle of the universe.”³²
Modernism—as understood in this book—begins more-or-less where
Spencer ends. (Herbert Spencer died in 1903.) In the closing decades of
the nineteenth century, naturalist fiction was inspired by, and sought to
model, evolutionary processes. Like many of their contemporaries world-
wide, George Eliot and Thomas Hardy took as their guiding principle the
natural law given by positivist evolutionary theory.³³ Émile Zola famously
²⁸ The “two cultures” is C. P. Snow’s term: The Two Cultures, ed. Stefan Collini (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2014). But as Aldous Huxley shows, the debate was very much
alive already in the work of Matthew Arnold. Literature and Science: Science, Liberty and Peace.
(London: Chatto & Windus, 1970). See also Joseph Carroll’s chapter “The Use of Arnold in a
Darwinian World” in Joseph Carroll, Literary Darwinism: Evolution, Human Nature, and
Literature (New York: Routledge, 2004), 3–14.
²⁹ Jim Cramer, “ ‘Sociobiology’—An Old Synthesis,” The Harvard Crimson, January 30, 1976,
http://www.thecrimson.com/article/1976/1/30/sociobiology-an-old-synthesis-pbebo-wilson-
has/. See also Mike Hawkins, Social Darwinism in European and American Thought, 1860–1945:
Nature as Model and Nature as Threat (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998),
292–313.
³⁰ Peter Morton, The Vital Science: Biology and the Literary Imagination, 1860–1900
(London; Boston: Allen & Unwin, 1984), 40.
³¹ Gordon Haight nicely quipped that Spencer “believed in the evolution of everything except
his own theories” qtd. in Kathryn Hughes, George Eliot: The Last Victorian (New York: Farrar
Straus Giroux, 2001), 124.
³² Allusions in this paragraph are to Herbert Spencer, Illustrations of Universal Progress; a
Series of Discussions (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1888) and Ernst Haeckel, The Riddle of
the Universe at the Close of the Nineteenth Century, trans. Joseph McCabe (New York; London:
Harper & Brothers, 1900).
³³ The classic account is Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin,
George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
For this tendency in Spanish fiction, see Travis Landry, Subversive Seduction: Darwin, Sexual
Selection, and the Spanish Novel (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2012). See also Carol
16     
champions this agenda in “Le Roman expérimental.” Proposing that creative

writing might model itself on Claude Bernard’s experimental medicine, he
imagines a novelistic method that plays out hypothetical situations exposing
biological determinism. This new novel not only records evolution’s pro-
cesses (as in, say, the Rougon-Macquart series), but also thereby furthers an
evolutionary metanarrative of scientific advance: it enters consiliently “upon
the scientific pathway, obedient to the general evolution of the century.”³⁴
Often modernists inherited the naturalists’ sense of being engaged in
biological work. In “Ornament and Crime,” Adolf Loos presents the turn
against ornament as part of human phylogeny (that is, part of the process of
development of the human species).³⁵ Ezra Pound believed that his juxta-
positional technique was the rigorous application of the best “method of
contemporary biologists.”³⁶ And Simon Joyce has recently described the
extent to which modernist prose forms such as stream of consciousness
developed naturalism’s interest in environmental determinism.³⁷ However,
attempts to read evolution into modernism in the same way that one reads
evolution into nineteenth-century fiction tend to have only local traction;
there is no defining book like Gillian Beer’s Darwin’s Plots for the modernist
period. This is because what is most interesting about modernism’s engage-
ment with biology is not its complicity with coherent forms of applied
Darwinism or its various crossovers with eugenics, so much as the resources
it develops for resisting and complicating univocal or dogmatic representa-
tions of evolution.³⁸ Where the naturalists were accused of echoing dominant
Colatrella, Evolution, Sacrifice, and Narrative: Balzac, Zola, and Faulkner (New York: Garland,
1990), and Clinton Machann, Masculinity in Four Victorian Epics: A Darwinist Reading
(Farnham: Ashgate, 2010).
³⁴ Émile Zola, The Experimental Novel, and Other Essays, trans. Belle Sherman (New York:
Cassell, 1893), 33. The novel, of course, did not have to narrate universal progress. Degeneration
was also consilient with Darwinism, as suggested by the title of Edwin Ray Lankester’s
Degeneration, a Chapter in Darwinism (London: Macmillan, 1880).
³⁵ Adolf Loos, “Ornament and Crime” in Ulrich Conrads, (Programs and Manifestos of 20th
Century Architecture, Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1964), 19–24.
³⁶ Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading (New York: New Directions, 2010), 17. See also Lois
A. Cuddy, T.S. Eliot and the Poetics of Evolution: Sub/Versions of Classicism, Culture, and
Progress (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2000).
³⁷ Simon Joyce, Modernism and Naturalism in British and Irish Fiction, 1880–1930
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).
³⁸ For one account of modernism and eugenics, see Nancy Ordover’s American Eugenics:
Race, Queer Anatomy, and the Science of Nationalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2003). For a clear articulation of new literature’s need to oppose eugenics, see Gilbert
Keith Chesterton, Eugenics and Other Evils (London: Cassell and Company, 1922). For an
excellent description of the variety and playfulness of theatrical engagements with evolution in
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evolutionary thought in their fiction, many modernists saw that evolution

had come, by virtue of the “naturalistic fallacy” (labeled as such by
G. E. Moore in 1903), to operate as a biopolitical imperative on the very
phenomena that it explained.³⁹ Their epics were composed at a moment
when a monolithic ideology founded on Darwinism was beginning to crack.
A different way to put this is to say that literary modernism participated
in the eclipse of Darwinism.⁴⁰ Narrowly defined, the eclipse designates the
climate of doubt over natural selection as the sole mechanism of descent,
which lasted from around 1890 until the rise of Neo-Darwinism cham-
pioned by Theodosius Dobzhansky and Julian Huxley in the 1930s and 40s.
Before the 1890s, Darwin’s ideas had been generally accepted. Origin of
Species was published late in 1859. Although there was a brief moment of
religious opposition (memorialized in the 1860 Wilberforce—T. H. Huxley
debate), in the succeeding thirty years, natural selection came to be broadly
acknowledged across a range of disciplines. Beginning in the 1890s, how-
ever, this mechanistic understanding of evolutionary processes came into
question. New findings appeared not to be consilient with it. So, for example,
in 1897 Lord Kelvin revised his calculations of the age of the Earth according
to estimated heat loss to confidently assert that it was only 20 million years
old, not nearly enough for natural selection to explain the fossil record and
diversity of current species.⁴¹ More significantly, from 1900 onwards, Gregor
Mendel’s rediscovered study of peas seemed to show that whole attributes
were pre-coded into species and therefore to dispute Darwin’s idea of tiny
changes occurring continuously. Only with the development of population
the period, see Kirsten Shepherd-Barr, Theatre and Evolution from Ibsen to Beckett (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2015).
³⁹ “Middlemarch is too often an echo of Messrs. Darwin and Huxley,” complained Henry
James. qt. by Joseph Carroll, Evolution and Literary Theory (Columbia: University of Missouri
Press, 1995), 144. For the “naturalistic fallacy,” see George Edward Moore, Principia Ethica
(Mineola, NY: Dover, 2004), 11.
⁴⁰ Peter Bowler offers detailed accounts of this phenomenon in The Eclipse of Darwinism:
Anti-Darwinian Evolution Theories in the Decades Around 1900 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1992) and The Non-Darwinian Revolution: Reinterpreting a Historical Myth
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992). For problems associated with the term, see
Mark A. Largent, “The So-Called Eclipse of Darwinism,” Transactions of the American
Philosophical Society 99, no. 1 (2009): 3–21. For one account of the relations between
American literature and the eclipse, see Bert Bender, Evolution and “the Sex Problem”:
American Narratives during the Eclipse of Darwinism (Kent, OH: The Kent State University
Press, 2004).
⁴¹ Bowler, The Eclipse of Darwinism, 3.
18     
genetics did it begin to seem that Mendelism and Darwinism might be

reconciled in a new koiné: Neo-Darwinism.
More broadly, the eclipse of Darwinism marks a manifold crisis in the life
sciences, when no one understanding of evolution, and evolution’s social
meanings, was sovereign or capable of becoming a principle of synthesis. In
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s mode, we might map it as less arbores-
cent, and more rhizomatic; the shape of evolution in the eclipse suggests less
one ordered totality and more a poetic and networked heterogeneity. As
Peter Bowler has described, the eclipse was a moment of debate in which
many biological, philosophical, and literary substitutes to Darwinism were
imagined and circulated (e.g. Henri Bergson’s Creative Evolution, Friedrich
Nietzsche’s notion of the Übermensch, Hans Driesch’s vitalism, Peter
Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid, D’Arcy Thompson’s Structuralism, Hugo de
Vries’s saltationism, Henry Fairfield Osborn’s views on orthogenesis, and a
gamut of more esoteric Neo-Lamarckian theories of acquired characteris-
tics).⁴² During this period, Darwinism was challenged from many different
quarters by the production of alternatives, some of which—August
Weismann’s germ-plasm theory, for instance—would later turn out to be
more Neo-Darwinian than, say, Darwin’s own notions of pangenesis.
Literary fiction played a crucial role in this production of alternatives.
In Eberhard Dennert’s 1903 collection of essays, Vom Sterbelager des
Darwinismus, translated in the following year as At the Deathbed of
Darwinism, we read of how Darwinism is seen among contemporary scien-
tists as “a fiction, a poetical accumulation of probabilities without proof.”⁴³
Histories of biology from the time suggested that creative writers could upset
or redirect the course of biological thought and investigation. Emanuel Rádl
develops this line of thought in the second part of his 1909 History of
Modern Biological Theories. To innovative writers, Rádl held, Darwinism
had come to seem old-fashioned or “unmodern.”⁴⁴ In fact, at the beginning
of his penultimate chapter, “Verfall des Darwinismus” or “The “Decline of
Darwinism,” Rádl implies that it was “Poesie” (by which he means also prose
⁴² Bowler, The Eclipse of Darwinism. See also Frederick Burwick and Paul Douglass, eds., The
Crisis in Modernism: Bergson and the Vitalist Controversy (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1992).
⁴³ Edwin O’Hara, “Preface,” in At the Deathbed of Darwinism, A Series of Papers, by
Eberhard Dennert, trans. E. V. O’Hara and John Peschges (Burlington, IA: German Literary
Board, 1904), 16.
⁴⁴ “Unmodern“ is Rádl’s original German term. Emanuel Rádl, Geschichte der biologischen
Theorien in der Neuzeit, vol. 2 (Leipzig und Berlin: Verlag von W. Engelmann, 1913), 563.
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narrative and literary criticism) that was the first field to turn the tables on
Darwinism:⁴⁵
Dahin ist die Zeit, wo C. Du Prel die Lyrik für »paläontologische

Weltanschauung«, für Atavismus erklären durfte, der durch den Fortschritt
der Wissenschaft ausgerottet wird: Dekadenten, Mystiker, Nietzscheaner und
verschiedene Modernitäten überwucherten die Trümmer der wissenschaftli-
chen Weltanschauung.
(The time when a du Prel could assert that poetry represents a
‘paleontological worldview’, an atavism, and that it would be exterminated
by the advance of science, had passed. Decadents, mystics, followers of
Nietzsche and other modernisms, spread over the ruins of the scientific
worldview.)⁴⁶
For Rádl, Nietzsche stands at the prow here of a creative insurgency in

thinking about evolution that is manifested primarily in aesthetic fields.
What would come to be known as the singular Modernism is thus, in one of
its earliest theorizations, causally connected to, and given space to develop
by, the ruin of the Darwinist edifice.
Some critics have long recognized that the new literature, in its various
forms and geographical expressions, hinged on developments in the life
sciences.⁴⁷ “It is hardly accidental” wrote George Rousseau in 1992, “that . . .
modernism . . . arises . . . simultaneously with modern biology. The two
viewed in tandem . . . offer the most substantial proof for the unity of cultural
development and pose a significant challenge to those who claim that large
concurrent cultural movements usually have little impact on each other.”⁴⁸
Anchored in Rousseau’s suggestion, this book will read modernism—in its
⁴⁵ Rádl, Geschichte, 541. ⁴⁶ Rádl, Geschichte, 542. My translation.

⁴⁷ Mark Morrisson writes that “modernism emerged during and contributed to major
paradigm shifts in virtually all of the sciences and many technologies” Modernism, Science,
and Technology (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), 113. This is true for biology, and
Morrisson’s chapter on the life sciences offers a useful overview. For readings of modernism
through debates about the life sciences, see Margot Norris, Beasts of the Modern Imagination:
Darwin, Nietzsche, Kafka, Ernst, & Lawrence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1985), and Omri Moses, Out of Character: Modernism, Vitalism, Psychic Life (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2014).
⁴⁸ George Rousseau, “The Perpetual Crises of Modernism and the Traditions of
Enlightenment Vitalism: With a Note on Mikhail Bakhtin” in The Crisis in Modernism, 20.
Rousseau’s claim is also cited by Oliver Botar and Isabel Wünsche in their introduction to
Biocentrism and Modernism (London; New York: Routledge, 2016), 3.
20     
global reach—as entailed on, and participating in the new developments in

evolution.
It is important to note, however, that the eclipse was not a typical
Kuhnian paradigm shift. It was not like relativity, for example, in which
Einsteinian physics replaced Newtonian physics. Rather this shift originated
and was visible primarily as a negative reaction. As the man who coined the
term—Julian Huxley—suggests, the eclipse began not primarily because of
perceived contradictions in natural selection, not because a better explan-
ation had appeared, but because natural selection had become—ironically—
too successful as a heuristic. In the 1890s, “the younger zoologists” grew
dissatisfied with the shape and procedures of their field. The application of
Darwinism had turned, Huxley intimates, into a kind of tautological
pabulum:
The paper demonstration that such and such a character was or might be
adaptive was regarded by many writers as sufficient proof that it must owe
its origin to Natural Selection. Evolutionary studies became more and
more merely case-books of real and supposed adaptations. Late
nineteenth-century Darwinism came to resemble the early nineteenth-
century school of Natural Theology. Paley redivivus, one might say, but
philosophically upside down, with Natural Selection instead of Divine
Artificer as the Deus ex machina. There was little contact of evolutionary
speculation with the concrete facts of cytology and heredity, or with actual
experimentation.⁴⁹
According to Huxley, the response of figures like William Bateson or Hugo

de Vries was to return to the data and begin questioning. For innovative
authors interested in biology, Darwinism no longer provided a readymade
formula for composing historical fiction. For example, the creative work of
Gertrude Stein and James Joyce (who both abandoned their medical studies
at the turn of the century) emerges from the same context as the “younger
zoologists” of the eclipse. Both use it to question Darwinism. Jaroslav Hašek,
who was more interested in biological literature than belles-lettres, likewise
challenged social-Darwinist assumptions in his fiction; Mário de Andrade
encountered similar debates in the work of figures such as the Spenglerian
Hermann von Keyserling; and Virginia Woolf ’s connections to debates over
⁴⁹ Julian Huxley, Evolution: The Modern Synthesis (London: George Allen & Unwin,
1942), 23.
:       21
Darwinism were—as many critics have noted—profound and personal. In

each case, Darwin’s waning allowed for an oedipal (or rather, anti-oedipal)
reaction that drew on many different currents. This, more than the detailed
mechanisms of descent themselves, was important for modernists. The
eclipse allowed the younger writers to be against an evolution that for
their parents’ generation had seemed coherent and totalizing without neces-
sarily being for something determinate in exchange. In fact, what they were
for stood to be defined in the space of their experimental epics.
Epic in the 1920s
In one of the many self-conscious twists of Miguel de Cervantes’s Don

Quixote, a character remarks that “epic can be written in prose as well as
in verse.”⁵⁰ Cervantes is challenging us to consider that the down-to-earth
burlesque we are reading may indeed be a natural medium for epic in
modernity. A similar challenge is at the heart of The Evolutions of
Modernist Epic. I am aware that approaching The Making of Americans,
Ulysses, Švejk, Macunaíma, and Orlando in relation to the central term epic
is an unorthodox, even quixotic, move, and that it may meet with resistance
from readers with conservative ideas about literary classification. Epics are
supposed to be long and heroic poems. Moreover, in dominant accounts of
western literary history and the philosophy of literary forms, epic, by the
twentieth century, is either dead or moribund. While attempts to compose
epic certainly had a long afterlife in the age of nation building and in
postcolonial liberation movements, modernism is generally defined against
precisely this kind of patriotic writing. In contemporary approaches, mod-
ernism represents a shift away from national frameworks towards the
creation of a cosmopolitan, world literature. From this perspective, the
treatment of Ulysses or Macunaíma in relation to the genre will seem
wrong-headed.
For most literary historians, working in the vein of Mikhail Bakhtin, the
more appropriate genre in which to classify these texts would be the novel.
Where, for Bakhtin, the epic is monologic, authoritarian, and like a “dead
language,” the novel is young, alive, and dialogic. It is polyphonic, has
multiple perspectives, and is “organically receptive” to new readings as
⁵⁰ Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote, trans. John Rutherford (New York: Penguin,
2003), 442.
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well as to the incorporation of other genres.⁵¹ It is the novel that is celebrated

for its unusual forms, its anti-traditionalism, and its liveliness in modernity.
Indeed, it is also the novel that has, according to Benedict Anderson, the
closest relationship with the production of national communities in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries; and it is as novels that Woolf ’s
Orlando or Hašek’s Švejk have received their fullest critical treatments.⁵²
Such treatments are not wrong, but neither—when considering the inter-
connections between these texts—are they very helpful, or even very inter-
esting. For describing Americans, Ulysses, Švejk, Macunaíma, and Orlando
as novels does not do justice to their large-scale ambition, their mythopoetic
dimensions, and their engagement with history as a totality. These are not
books about individuals and their social relations, but rather about collect-
ivities and communal life. For cases like these, literary criticism needs
another genre apart from, and in some ways opposed to, the novel. It
needs a more dialogical conception of epic than Bakhtin’s static notion—
not an axiological take on the genre as something these texts belong to, but
rather a role that they take up and inhabit and reconstruct for the twentieth
century.⁵³ As John Frow has suggested, if genres are to be useful tools in
contemporary literary theory, they should be approached not as preexistent
ontological categories, but as changing discourses, discourses that might
overlap, inform each other, and contain contradictions.⁵⁴
In this looser sense, epic was much more vital in the early 1900s than
commonly assumed. Herbert Tucker has made the case that, despite
Bakhtin’s claims, “works of conspicuously epic shape and aspiration” con-
tinued to be written throughout nineteenth century and into the twentieth.⁵⁵
In the 1920s, it was a surprisingly prominent form. Among the list of Nobel
Prize winners for literature in the immediate post-war were the Swiss Carl
Spitteler in 1919, “in special appreciation of his epic, Olympian Spring,”
Knut Hamsun in 1920 “for his monumental work, Growth of the Soil,” and
⁵¹ M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 1981), 3.
⁵² Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism (London; New York: Verso, 1991).
⁵³ See Sneharika Roy, The Postcolonial Epic from Melville to Walcott and Ghosh (Andover:
Routledge Ltd, 2018), 7. For the impossibility of “belonging” to genre, see Jacques Derrida, “The
Law of Genre,” trans. Avital Ronell, Critical Inquiry 7, no. 1 (1980): 55–81.
⁵⁴ John Frow, Genre (London; New York: Routledge, 2006), 18.
⁵⁵ Herbert F. Tucker, Epic: Britain’s Heroic Muse 1790–1910 (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2008), 5.
:       23
Władysław Reymont in 1924 for “his great national epic The Peasants.”⁵⁶
“Far from being an anachronism during the 1920s and ’30s,” writes Paul
Saint-Amour, “epic was so congruent with the emergent discourse of total
war as to seem utterly contemporary.”⁵⁷ “There has been no age more epical
than ours,” wrote Nikos Kazantzakis, whose life, from 1883 to 1957, spanned
high modernism.⁵⁸ For Kazantzakis, epic—both in verse (The Odyssey:
A Modern Sequel), and in prose (in Zorba the Greek)—was the most
appropriate medium for his era.
This importance of epic to the period is best understood by reference to
György Lukács’s Theory of the Novel, written in 1914–15, but not published
in book form until 1920. Although often read as a key argument for the
impossibility of epic in the modern world, in fact, Lukács’s work is a
testament to its ongoing discursive centrality. For Lukács, epic is the form
given to “the extensive totality of life” experienced by Homer or Dante.⁵⁹
Where in the Homeric poems such totality is given, since everything in them
can be explained internally, by reference to the workings of the gods,
modern literature is not equally self-sufficient. The ground of explanation
always exceeds the work itself. This is how Lukács understands the big novel
(as instantiated by Cervantes, Goethe, Tolstoy, or Flaubert). It occupies the
same place as epic, as a “great epic form of literature” (die Grosse Epik), even
while “epic proper” (die Epopöe) is no longer achievable. “The novel,” he
writes, “is the epic of an age in which the extensive totality of life is no longer
directly given, in which the immanence of meaning in life has become a
problem, and which yet still thinks in terms of totality” (Der Roman ist die
Epopöe eines Zeitalters, für das die extensive Totalität des Lebens nicht
mehr sinnfällig gegeben ist, für das die Lebensimmanenz des Sinnes zum
Problem geworden ist, und das dennoch die Gesinnung zur Totalität hat).⁶⁰
⁵⁶ See All Nobel Prizes in Literature. NobelPrize.org. Nobel Media AB 2019. Fri. 10 Jan 2020.
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/lists/all-nobel-prizes-in-literature/. The proximity between
this writing and new evolutionary thought is suggested by the fact that a number of the best
sellers for the same years were evolutionary universal histories, such as H. G. Wells’s The
Outline of History or Hendrik Willem Van Loon, The Story of Mankind, and that the Nobel
Prize winner for 1927 in literature was none other than Henri Bergson.
⁵⁷ Paul K. Saint-Amour, Tense Future: Modernism, Total War, Encyclopedic Form (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 185.
⁵⁸ Qtd. in Theodore L. Steinberg, Twentieth-Century Epic Novels (Newark: University of
Delaware Press, 2005), 23.
⁵⁹ György Lukács, The Theory of the Novel: A Historical Philosophical Essay on the Forms of
Great Epic Literature, trans Anna Bostock (Baltimore: John Hopkins Press, 1971), 56.
⁶⁰ Lukács, Theory of the Novel, 56; György Lukács, Die Theorie des Romans: Ein
geschichtsphilosophischer Versuch über die Formen der großen Epik (Berlin: Paul Cassirer,
1920), 44.
24     
Or again, “The novel is the epic of a world that has been abandoned by God”
(Der Roman ist die Epopöe der gottverlassenen Welt).⁶¹
For understanding modernism’s most ambitious prose works and their
relation to evolution, Lukács’s assertions of the impossibility of epic are less
important than his evocation of its possibilities: his reading of the great
novel as epic manqué. This is where he differs from Hegel. Hegel presents
the epic as an epiphenomenon of a particular early stage of civilizational
development and an organic expression of that stage, something surpassed
by the organized State, and effectively made unnecessary by what Alexandre
Kojève identified as the “end of history.”⁶² In contrast, Lukács, writing on
the eve of the war and in rejection of enthusiasm for war, locates the implicit
ideal of the great novel in a return to an epic metaphysics. The effect of his
famously lyrical opening is to make us feel the need for a new epic and new
coherence. Epic writing in practice (the epic-approximating novel as well as
long poems such as The Waste Land) becomes a way of addressing this
problem.
Although few of the writers discussed here were familiar with Lukács, his
theorization helps to explain the extraordinary production of experimental
epic-like works of the period. In many parts of the world, for authors
composing historical works of narrative fiction at the beginning of the
twentieth century, epic formed a horizon of possibilities against which
their projects would attain meaning and legibility and social relevance.
Occasionally, this is made explicit, albeit usually with a good dose of
irony. So, for instance, it is in regard to epic, in the first book of Proust’s
Recherche, that Marcel explains his family’s habit of eating lunch an hour
early on Saturdays:
Le retour de ce samedi asymétrique était un de ces petits événements

intérieurs, locaux, presque civiques qui, dans les vies tranquilles et les
sociétés fermées, créent une sorte de lien national et deviennent le thème
favori des conversations, des plaisanteries, des récits exagérés à plaisir: il
eût été le noyau tout prêt pour un cycle légendaire si l’un de nous avait eu la
tête épique.⁶³
⁶¹ Lukács, Theory of the Novel, 88; Lukács, Theorie des Romans, 84.
⁶² See Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox,
vol. 2 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 1064–5, and Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the
Reading of Hegel, trans. James Nichols, Ithaca (Cornell University Press, 2012).
⁶³ Marcel Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu, ed. Jean-Yves Tadié, Bibliothèque de la
Pléiade, vol. 1 (Paris: Librairie Galimard, 1987), 109.
:       25
(The recurrence of this asymmetrical Saturday was one of those minor

events, intra-mural, localised, almost civic, which in uneventful lives and
stable orders of society, create a kind of national tie and become the
favourite theme for conversation, for pleasantries, for anecdotes which
can be embroidered as the narrator pleases; it would have provided the
ready-made kernel for a legendary cycle, had any of us had an epic turn of
mind.)⁶⁴
The joke here is on Proust’s persona, who doesn’t realize that the wanted
man with the “epic turn of mind” is himself. Marcel, of course, will become
the posited author of a legendary cycle of mealtimes in his enormous
fiction.⁶⁵ A similar winking illeism occurs in the National Library of
Ireland in the “Scylla and Charybdis” of Ulysses, when a character exclaims,
with reference to Don Quixote, and in the presence of Stephen Dedalus, that
“our national epic has yet to be written [ . . . ] Moore is the man for it.”⁶⁶ Or
likewise, in The Man without Qualities, when Hans bewails the lack of
“einen österreichischen Mythos,” its own “Epos.” Musil’s book—dedicated
as it is to finding some kind of form for the Parallel Campaign—can be read,
again of course, ironically, as filling the gap.⁶⁷ In each case, the self-
referential gesture suggests the idea of a work that might enfold everything,
including its own history.
Modernist Epic Revisited
Typically, when we think of modernist epic, the first text that springs to
mind is Ezra Pound’s tricky masterpiece, The Cantos. Pound’s understand-
ing of epic, as a “poem including history” is fundamental to a sense of the
⁶⁴ Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, Volume I: Swann’s Way, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff
and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D. J. Enright (New York: Random House Publishing Group,
2003), 153.
⁶⁵ We know that this is a fiction specifically pictured as filling the gap of a missing French
national epic both from the context, since the events it contains are dedicated to “creating a kind
of national bond,” and because—as Antoine Compagnon observes—“la tête épique” is a
reference to “Nicolas de Malézieux’s famous line: ‘Les Français n’ont pas la tête épique,’
taken up by Voltaire in his Essai sur la poésie épique to account for the absence of a great
French epic . . . ”. Antoine Compagnon, “Lost Allusions in À la recherche du temps perdu,” in
Proust in Perspective: Visions and Revisions, ed. Armine Kotin Mortimer and Katherine Kolb
(Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 140.
⁶⁶ Joyce, Ulysses, 158.
⁶⁷ Robert Musil, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 1 (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1978), 558.
26     
ambitions of this genre.⁶⁸ As Dan Blanton has described in Epic Negation,

the formulation represents two drives: one is to include history in the sense
of the tale of the tribe, a series of events; the other is to include history as a
theoretical totality. Pound’s work is concerned with history not just as a
narrative, but also as the underlying principle of “rhyming events,” a con-
ceptual structure on the “largest possible scale.”⁶⁹
Both potentials are important for considering the relation between mod-
ernist epic and evolutionary thought. The works studied here attempt to
imagine alternative totalities to that of applied Darwinism. Ezra Pound,
however, will not be our lodestar in studying them. This is because following
his lead would foreclose investigation in certain well-trodden ways. Firstly,
this center of gravity would pull, ineluctably, towards an identification of the
genre with the Pound tradition and budding networks of the Ezuversity,
whereas in fact, engagements with epic in the period, especially in prose and
in other languages, were more diverse and demotic than such an approach
suggests.⁷⁰ And secondly, as Blanton describes, establishing the logic of
modernist epic through Pound means confronting the problem of the
genre’s impossibility and making that impossibility its defining feature.
For Pound, as for Lukács, true epic was unachievable because historical
totality was unrepresentable—history, post-Homer, being includable only in
fragments, “spezzato,” as a “bad infinity,” or approximated in “biographical
form,” not as a coherent given. This hard definition leads us into a double
bind. Either we continue to chase the mirage of modernist epic into theor-
etical abstraction, discovering in it a negated index of late modernism
itself—its “formally distinctive turn” (Blanton’s book), or recognizing its
⁶⁸ Ezra Pound, “Date Line,” in Make It New (London: Faber and Faber, 1934), 19.
⁶⁹ For this discussion, see C. D. Blanton, Epic Negation: The Dialectical Poetics of Late
Modernism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 3–7. For the “tale of the tribe,” a
concept to which we will turn also in the last chapter, see Michael André Bernstein, The Tale
of the Tribe: Ezra Pound and the Modern Verse Epic (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1980).
⁷⁰ For takes on the Pound school of modernist epic, including the works of T. S. Eliot, H. D.,
Louis Zukofsky, William Carlos Williams, Charles Olson, see e.g. Christopher John Beach, ABC
of Influence: Ezra Pound and the Remaking of American Poetic Tradition, (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1992), or Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Purple Passages: Pound, Eliot, Zukofsky,
Olson, Creeley, and the Ends of Patriarchal Poetry (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2012).
For some alternative engagements with epic see Matthew Hart, Nations of Nothing but Poetry:
Modernism, Transnationalism, and Synthetic Vernacular Writing (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2013); Kathy Lou Schultz, The Afro-Modernist Epic and Literary History:
Tolson, Hughes, Baraka (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Justine McConnell, Black
Odysseys: The Homeric Odyssey in the African Diaspora Since 1939 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press), 2013; and Nigel Alderman, “Introduction: Pocket Epics: British Poetry
After Modernism,” The Yale Journal of Criticism 13, no. 1 (2000): 1–2.
:       27
impossibility we prefer another label: the “long poem,” novel, or “encyclopedic

fiction.”⁷¹ Scholarship on these genres informs the coming pages. But if we
separate modernist attempts at something like epic from epic as such, the
approach to epic from its achievement, we also lose, as Herbert Tucker
shows, a “longitudinal consistency” in the genre. Modernism ends up
disconnected from a historical discourse that had a consistent presence
and real influence throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.⁷² It
makes more sense to begin thinking about the genre again, positively rather
than negatively, as integral to modernism’s most ambitious prose works.
This kind of approach is modeled in Franco Moretti’s 1996 study, Modern
Epic: The World-System from Goethe to García Márquez—a book that has
since inspired a number of engagements with prose epic, including
Christopher Phillips’s eloquent Epic in American Culture: Settlement to
Reconstruction, Stephano Ercolino’s The Maximalist Novel: From Thomas
Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow to Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, and, recently,
Matthew Miller’s The German Epic in the Cold War: Peter Weiss, Uwe
Johnson, and Alexander Kluge.⁷³ Moretti is also the éminence grise of the
current study. There is, however, a fundamental difference between the book
you are reading and Moretti’s, which needs to be noted at the outset. For
Moretti, the modern epic has survived into late modernity by its exceptional
capacity to fulfil the specific function of narrating a globalizing
Wallersteinian world-system. Modern epics are the select evolutionary
products of western civilization. (Moretti’s canon consists of “half a
dozen” great texts composed since 1800: Faust, Moby-Dick, Bouvard et
Pécuchet, Wagner’s Ring Cycle, Ulysses, and One Hundred Years of
⁷¹ For the modernist long poem see Margaret Dickie, On the Modernist Long Poem (Iowa
City: University of Iowa Press, 1986). For more recent accounts, see Oliver Tearle, The Great
War, the Waste Land and the Modernist Long Poem (New York: Bloomsbury, 2019), and eds.
Uri S. Cohen, Michael Golston, Vered K. Shemtov. The Long Poem, a special issue of Dibur
(no. 4, Spring 2017).
⁷² “What radical changes the first modernists visited on epic can be only notionally appre-
hended, and at best coarsely appreciated, without reference to the genre’s continuous tradition
during the preceding century, of which the modernists themselves were aware even if those who
study them are not.” Tucker, Epic, 7. For a similar claim, see Mary Ellis Gibson, Epic Reinvented:
Ezra Pound and the Victorians (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995).
⁷³ Christopher N. Phillips, Epic in American Culture: Settlement to Reconstruction
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012); Stefano Ercolino, The Maximalist Novel:
From Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow to Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 (London: Bloomsbury
Academic, 2015); Matthew D. Miller, The German Epic in the Cold War: Peter Weiss, Uwe
Johnson, and Alexander Kluge (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2018).
28     
Solitude.)⁷⁴ These are the texts that have become our cultural Bibles because
of their adaptation to a particular niche of market forces. Yet, of course, in
identifying epic by its success in a Darwinist economy, Moretti associates the
genre not so much with anything intrinsic to them, as with their reception.
Modern epic, accordingly, emerges as an epiphenomenon of market-driven
canon-formation.⁷⁵
This book follows Moretti in linking epic to evolutionary understandings
of cultural history. But unlike Moretti, it also sees in modernist epic an
agency for troubling such top-down applications of Darwinism to the
development of literary forms. Interestingly, as with Wilson’s sociobiology,
ideas similar to Moretti’s Darwinist view of literary history circulated
throughout the later nineteenth and early twentieth-centuries (for instance,
in the work of Boris Eikhenbaum or the positivist philologist Aleksandr
Veselovkii).⁷⁶ As we will see in Joyce’s lectures, among other places, early
twentieth-century writers were aware of these ideas. One of the most
exciting potentials of modernist epic, which Moretti misses, is precisely as
a space where social evolution is reimagined, and where—accordingly—his
metahistorical model for the genre might be enriched and rewritten by the
texts themselves. The following chapters affirm this potential by lingering
over a variety of creative engagements with national evolution. The first
proposes Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans as a foundational text
for helping us to begin rethinking epic as critically involved with social
Darwinism. Chapter 2 then looks at how Joyce’s adaptation of this genre
links to topics such as of atavism—the persistence of earlier evolutionary
traits in late modernity. Chapter 3 develops a push against modernist epic’s
exclusivism by addressing the ways Švejk crosses the Great Divide between
⁷⁴ Moretti, Modern Epic, 3. For a later step in Moretti’s development of this methodology
into a larger literary Darwinism, see also Franco Moretti, “World-Systems Analysis,
Evolutionary Theory, ‘Weltliteratur,’ ” Review (Fernand Braudel Center) 28, no. 3 (2005):
217–28.
⁷⁵ For critiques of Moretti along these lines, see Marjorie Perloff, “Epic Ecologies,” Electronic
Book Review, 1998, http://electronicbookreview.com/essay/epic-ecologies/ and Christopher
Prendergast, “Evolution and Literary History,” New Left Review, August 2005, http://
newleftreview.org/II/34/christopher-prendergast-evolution-and-literary-history. For the preju-
dice built into assertions of what qualifies as modern epic, see Joseph Farrell’s “Walcott’s
Omeros: The Classical Epic in a Postmodern World,” in Epic Traditions in the Contemporary
World: The Poetics of Community, ed. Margaret Beissinger, Jane Tylus, and Susanne Wofford
(Berkeley: University of California press, 1999), 270–96.
⁷⁶ For the relations between Moretti’s literary Darwinism and his Russian forebears, see Peter
Steiner, “Digital Humanities and Russian Formalism: Darwinism and anti-Darwinism in
Literary History” Vestnik SPbSU. Philosophy and Conflict Studies, vol. 33, issue 2, (2017),
217–23.
:       29
high and low. And in the final chapter, on Woolf ’s English Orlando, and
Andrade’s Brazilian Macunaíma, we will establish how the modernist
coordination of evolution and epic provides a useful ground for comparing
national fictions across geographical and cultural gulfs.
Counter-evolutions and Queer Vitalisms
In the constellation of narratives treated here, The Making of Americans,

Ulysses, The Adventures of the Good Soldier Švejk, Orlando, and Macunaíma,
evolution rarely comes directly to the surface. Certainly, there are explicit
mocking references to figures such as Herbert Spencer or processes such as
ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny. But more importantly, evolution oper-
ates and is operated on in the way these books reimagine epic. By rewriting
epic, these texts also rewrite evolution.
Evolution in this sense is not so much an explicit topic of the works
studied here, as part of what appears to be their formal subconscious. Gillian
Beer makes this presence clear in a neat analogy between Darwin and Freud:
We now live in a post-Freudian age: it is impossible, in our culture, to live a

life which is not charged with Freudian assumptions, patterns for appre-
hending experience, ways of perceiving relationships, even if we have not
read a word of Freud, even – to take the case to its extreme – if we have no
Freudian terms in either our active or passive vocabulary. Freud suffi-
ciently disrupted all possible past patterns for apprehending experience
and his ideas have been so far institutionalized that even those who query
his views, or distrust them, find themselves unable to create a world
cleansed of the Freudian. This was the nature also of Darwin’s influence
on the generations which succeeded him. Everyone found themselves
living in a Darwinian world in which old assumptions had ceased to be
assumptions, could be at best beliefs, or myths, or, at worst, detritus of the
past.⁷⁷
Darwinism inhabits modernist texts as an ideology, and these texts’ critique

of it mostly takes place below the surface of their explicit content. In order
to bring it out, this book pays close attention not only to narrative forms
⁷⁷ Beer, Darwin’s Plots, 3.

30     
(the epic) but also to the treatment of sexuality. Both carry and contest
evolutionary processes. Narrative forms do this from the level of the sen-
tence to the level of the plot by, for instance, establishing and then upsetting
expectations of progress, organic teleology, or Whiggish history. Treatments
of sexuality do it by questioning or denaturalizing reproductive arrange-
ments and normal gendered maturity or family life.
Here it is worth pausing over the odd fact that, although epic is supposed
to be a narrative of “fathers and founders of families,” modernist epic rarely
celebrates conventional virility and reproductivity.⁷⁸ Almost however you
present it, it is surprisingly queer. Many of the texts associated with the
genre (think of say, Hart Crane’s The Bridge, Proust’s Recherche, H. D.’s
Trilogy, or T. E. Lawrence’s The Seven Pillars of Wisdom) thematize non-
normative sexuality, unusual gender roles, and anti-patriarchal social
arrangements. Reading this queerness in relation to the eclipse of
Darwinism provides an opportunity to think about it not only as an expres-
sion of a new social politics, but also, more importantly, as a vector of the
problematization of human nature as validated by Darwinian imperatives.⁷⁹
Modernist epic poses the question of heteropatriarchy’s naturalness and
probes the notion that the purpose of sex is procreation. In this sense, the
genre takes up the ideas of figures such as Vladimir Solovyov, and antici-
pates, to some degree, the work of contemporary theorists of reproductive
futurism.⁸⁰ The particular queerness of the epic texts treated here corres-
ponds with, and flows into, the genre’s agon with natural selection.
Doris Sommer has described how, in line with the concerns of
hygienists in Latin America, nineteenth-century nationalizing fiction fol-
lowed the blueprint of heterosexual romance.⁸¹ In a narrative such as José de
Alencar’s 1865 Iracema, the allegorical machinery operates through the
encounter between a Lusitanian patriarch and the native Iracema (anagram-
matically America, but also a Guaraní name), producing an infant, Moacir,
⁷⁸ Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 13.

⁷⁹ “The Darwinian imperative” is Carl Degler’s term. Carl Degler, In Search of Human
Nature the Decline and Revival of Darwinism in American Social Thought (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2007).
⁸⁰ Vladimir Sergeyevich Solovyov, The Meaning of Love, trans. Thomas R. Beyer (Hudson:
Lindisfarne Anthroposophy, 1985). See also Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the
Death Drive (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004); Paul B. Preciado, Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs,
and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era (New York: The Feminist Press, 2017).
⁸¹ Doris Sommer, Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1991).
:       31
who is cast as “the first Brazilian.”⁸² In modernist epic fiction, however,

heterosexuality cannot be said to offer a stencil for the national story.
Instead, there is an emphasis on alternative, perhaps more tenuous, forms
of connection. In Stein’s The Making of Americans, the moribund and
childless David Hersland derails the family’s progress. In Joyce’s Ulysses, it
is the homosocial relations between men that come to offer a sense of a
solidarity and continuity. A similar situation prevails in Hašek’s Švejk.
Meanwhile, in Orlando, the correlation between English history as a bio-
logical maturation and the developing body of the eponymous hero is
twisted, halfway through, when he changes sex into a woman. And in
Macunaíma, the libidinous hero is castrated, producing no surviving off-
spring. These works draw meaning from phenomena that social Darwinism
left in the darkness; they elaborate defenses of weakness and peculiarity, of
the androgyne and the infertile and of the triviality of everyday praxis, each
as constitutive of the larger community, rather than abnormal to it.
It is tempting to argue that modernist fiction eschewed biologistic forms
of thinking history and nationhood by stressing affiliative rather than
filiative kinships and identities. Along these lines, within 1920s anthropol-
ogy, we can see something like the impact of the eclipse of Darwinism as a
turn away from the views implied in The Descent of Man (where culture is
often a function of sexual selection), as well as related nomothetic
approaches. In this decade, Edward Burnett Tylor’s comparative evolution-
ism, Herbert Spencer’s organismic model of society, and Lewis Henry
Morgan’s notion of universal ethnic periods, each gave way to an emphasis
on grids of cultural and linguistic difference.⁸³ Anthropologists following
Franz Boas (Robert Lowie, Alfred Louis Kroeber, Margaret Mead, and
Bronisław Malinowski, among others) insisted on evolution’s inconsequen-
tiality to their studies. Their works develop innovative narrative strategies to
launch a new paradigm for understanding social systems. In the case of
Malinowski’s 1922 Argonauts of the Western Pacific this was itself a
⁸² See Naomi Lindstrom, “Foreword,” in Iracema, by José de Alencar, trans. Clifford

E. Landers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, USA, 2000), xviii–xix.
⁸³ See Edward Burnett Tylor, Primitive Culture (New York: Harper, 1958); Herbert Spencer,
“The Organic Analogy Reconsidered,” in Readings for a History of Anthropological Theory, ed.
Paul A Erickson and Liam Donat Murphy (North York, ON: University of Toronto Press,
2017); and Lewis Henry Morgan, Ancient Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1964).
32     
reimagining of classical epic.⁸⁴ We could say that modernist epic fiction

changes analogously by assuming evolution’s irrelevance. It shows that the
basis of community need not be genetic, that the tribal story can be told
perfectly well without selection and heredity. It does not need to construe
society or history biocentrically.
But this parallel is not fully warranted. As far as they are against evolution,
the fictions discussed here not only stress a tendency towards non-biological
relations, but also develop new conceptions of national nature and descent.
In these texts, sexuality provides a compensatory function, as a ground for a
kind of reterritorialization. In relation to this Deleuzian term, Elizabeth
Grosz writes that “art hijacks survival impulses and transforms them
through the vagaries and intensifications posed by sexuality, deranging
them into a new order, a new practice.”⁸⁵ Modernist epic used non-
normative sexuality in this way to derange established understandings of
community based on individual or national survival, biological belonging
and racial anthropology. Here, normative families are not simply dismissed,
but replaced, as Barry McCrea shows, by other queerer families.⁸⁶ Dominant
evolutionary ideology is countered by idiosyncratic versions of embodied
development. The historical dynamic of Švejk, for instance, is a kind of
locally specific survival of the unfittest; in Ulysses it is a “strandentwining
cable of allflesh” that binds characters together in a semi-biological, semi-
mythical net; in Orlando it is the gender-bending life of the eponymous hero
made up of various Sackville-Wests over several centuries; and in
Macunaíma, a metaphorical libidinal energy powers a surreal set of bodily
transformations. Each of these texts challenges Darwin’s “great principle of
evolution” with a biocentric alternative, with what Joanne Wood has
described as a “counter-evolution.”⁸⁷ And in each the authors raise the
possibility of writing a new epic as itself a vehicle for showing this
counter-evolutionary process. Wyndham Lewis recognized as much in his
⁸⁴ For a reading of Argonauts of the Western Pacific alongside The Waste Land and Ulysses
see Marc Manganaro, Culture, 1922: The Emergence of a Concept (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2002).
⁸⁵ Elizabeth Grosz, Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2008), 11. See also Benjamin Bateman, The Modernist Art of Queer
Survival (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017) and Susan McCabe, “Survival of the
Queerly Fit: Darwin, Marianne Moore, and Elizabeth Bishop,” Twentieth Century Literature
55, no. 4 (2009): 547–71.
⁸⁶ Barry McCrea, In the Company of Strangers: Family and Narrative in Dickens, Conan
Doyle, Joyce, and Proust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011).
⁸⁷ Darwin, Descent of Man 2: 386; Joanne A. Wood, “Counter-Evolution: The Prosthetics of
Early Modernist Form,” ELH 66, no. 2 (1999): 489.
:       33
1927 study, Time and Western Man, albeit with scathing disdain. Stein’s
writing, he inveighs, is informed by a “vitality” that is “vegetable rather than
animal. Its life is a low-grade, if tenacious, one; of the sausage, by-the-yard,
variety.” Her “monstrous, desperate, soggy lengths of primitive mass-life,
chopped off and presented to us as never-ending prose-song, is undoubtedly
intended as an epic contribution to the present mass democracy.”⁸⁸
At first sight, such counter-evolutions seem, as Lewis notes, absurd:
vitalist props from which the authors hang their more significant material.
Certainly they are humorous. But this does not mean that they should be
dismissed as encounters with evolutionary theory. Rather, as Dwight Culler,
Jane Goodall, Sam See, Michael Ghiselin, and others have variously argued,
comedy is an appropriate form for thinking the protean reversals and
arbitrariness of evolution without falling into the traps of a too-easy (in
Isabelle Stengers’s sense, risk free) social Darwinism.⁸⁹ It is precisely through
comedy—the comic epic—that biological change and sexual desire could be
played out in their full peculiarity.
Reading by the Light of the Eclipse
There is another reason why 1920s modernism offers an important

response, avant la lettre, to sociobiology’s consilient fusion of epic and
evolution. The ’20s was the last moment, in the history of western literature,
when it was possible to approach social evolution as an open question. In the
1930s, the terms of the relationship between evolutionary science and
national narrative were largely foreclosed. In the dictatorships of that dec-
ade, several of the different positions on questions of evolution became
enshrined as state ideologies. Nazi Germany claimed an evolutionary dis-
tinction between Aryans and Jews; in the Soviet Union, Lysenkoism was
⁸⁸ Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man (London: Chatto and Windus, 1927), 76, 77.
⁸⁹ Dwight Culler, “The Darwinian Revolution in Literary Form,” in The Art of Victorian
Prose, ed. George Levine and William Madden (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968),
224–46; Goodall, Performance and Evolution in the Age of Darwin; Sam See, “The Comedy of
Nature: Darwinian Feminism in Virginia Woolf ’s Between the Acts,” Modernism/modernity 17,
no. 3 (December 23, 2010): 639–67; Michael T. Ghiselin, The Triumph of the Darwinian Method
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). See also Morton, The Vital Science, 4. George
Levine, in concluding a study partly dedicated to showing that Darwin was himself a kind of
modernist writer, observes that “modernist literature” is “marked as much but not so obviously
by Darwin’s comedy as by his tragedy.” Levine, Darwin the Writer, 219. For Stengers’s ideas of
risk, see Cosmopolitics I (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010).
34     
adopted; while in Brazil, the Vargas regime instituted an official policy of

“racial democracy.”
The cooptation of evolutionary nationalism to totalitarian ends has, ever
since the Second World War, colored our approaches to thinking about the
relation between biology and national history. The connection has largely
become a ground of legitimation for ecofascist rhetorics.⁹⁰ Contemporary
scholars distrust any account of history as a living process and nations as
organic, or—in the Spenglerian sense—as superorganisms. Even conserva-
tives with economic attitudes indebted to applied Darwinism (free trade =
natural selection) prefer modernization theory to evolutionary theory as a
basis for universal history.⁹¹ As Pheng Cheah writes, critiques of the organi-
cist metaphor written in the aftermath of National Socialism “remain
extremely influential in contemporary discourse.”⁹² Our terms for treating
the relation of nature to nationhood, he continues, are still heavily deter-
mined by Hans Kohn’s wartime dichotomy between a good, Western,
liberal, nationalism, and a bad, Eastern, ethnic nationalism.⁹³
For efforts to understand the odd forms of early twentieth-century litera-
ture in their global diversity, this has produced the basic problem mentioned
in the opening pages of this introduction. Namely, it makes it difficult to
focus on the extent to which different modernisms emerge in tandem with
new organicisms and as legible fully only through new concepts of social
evolution. This problem affects, in particular, modernism’s “transnational
turn,” which has been exemplified in texts such as Jahan Ramazani’s A
Transnational Poetics (2009), Jessica Berman’s Modernist Commitments:
Ethics, Politics, and Transnational Modernism (2011), Mark Wollaeger and
Matt Eatough’s Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms (2012), Susan
Stanford Friedman’s Planetary Modernisms (2015), Eric Hayot and
Rebecca Walkowitz’s A New Vocabulary of Global Modernisms (2016),
Aarthi Vadde’s Chimeras of Form: Modernist Internationalism Beyond
Europe, 1914–2016 (2016), and Peter Kalliney’s Modernism in a Global
⁹⁰ See Jonathan Olsen, Nature and Nationalism: Right-Wing Ecology and the Politics of
Identity in Contemporary Germany (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999).
⁹¹ Considering Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee’s universal histories, Francis
Fukuyama rejects both on account of having “a similar organicist flaw by drawing a question-
able analogy between a culture or society and a biological organism.” The End of History and the
Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992), 68.
⁹² Pheng Cheah, Spectral Nationality: Passages of Freedom from Kant to Postcolonial
Literatures of Liberation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 20.
⁹³ See Hans Kohn, The Idea of Nationalism: A Study in Its Origins and Background. (Milton:
Taylor and Francis, 2017).
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The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Cambridge natural
history, Vol. 02 (of 10)
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever.
You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project
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you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the
country where you are located before using this eBook.
Title: The Cambridge natural history, Vol. 02 (of 10)
Author: Frank E. Beddard

W. B. Benham
F. W. Gamble
Marcus Hartog
Lilian Sheldon
Editor: S. F. Harmer
Sir A. E. Shipley
Release date: October 16, 2023 [eBook #71891]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: MacMillan and Co, 1901
Credits: Keith Edkins, Peter Becker and the Online Distributed Proofreading
Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images
generously made available by The Internet Archive)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CAMBRIDGE

NATURAL HISTORY, VOL. 02 (OF 10) ***
THE
CAMBRIDGE NATURAL HISTORY
EDITED BY
S. F. HARMER, M.A., Fellow of King's College, Cambridge; Superintendent of the

University Museum of Zoology
AND
A. E. SHIPLEY, M.A., Fellow of Christ's College, Cambridge; University Lecturer on

the Morphology of Invertebrates
VOLUME II
FLATWORMS AND MESOZOA

By F. W. Gamble, M.Sc. (Vict.), Owens College
NEMERTINES
By Miss L. Sheldon, Newnham College, Cambridge
THREAD-WORMS AND SAGITTA

By A. E. Shipley, M.A., Fellow of Christ's College, Cambridge
ROTIFERS
By Marcus Hartog, M.A., Trinity College, Cambridge (D.Sc. Lond.), Professor of Natural
History in the Queen's College, Cork
POLYCHAET WORMS
By W. Blaxland Benham, D.Sc. (Lond.), Hon. M.A. (Oxon.), Aldrichian Demonstrator of
Comparative Anatomy in the University of Oxford
EARTHWORMS AND LEECHES

By F. E. Beddard, M.A. (Oxon.), F.R.S., Prosector to the Zoological Society, London
GEPHYREA AND PHORONIS

By A. E. Shipley, M.A., Fellow of Christ's College, Cambridge
POLYZOA
By S. F. Harmer, M.A., Fellow of King's College, Cambridge
London
MACMILLAN AND CO., Limited
NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1901
All rights reserved
'Nous allons faire des vers ensemble'

André de Chénier
First Edition 1896. Reprinted 1901

CONTENTS
PAGE
Scheme of the Classification adopted in this Book ix
PLATYHELMINTHES AND MESOZOA

CHAPTER I
TURBELLARIA
Introduction—description of the Polyclad Leptoplana
tremellaris—Appearance—Habits—Structure: Polycladida—
Classification—Habits—Anatomy—Development: Tricladida—
Occurrence—Structure—Classification: Rhabdocoelida—
Occurrence—Habits—Reproduction—Classification 3
CHAPTER II
TREMATODA
Characters of Trematodes—Habits and Structure of Trematoda
Ectoparasitica (Monogenea)—Life-Histories of Polystomum
integerrimum, Diplozoon paradoxum, and Gyrodactylus
elegans—Trematoda Endoparasitica (Digenea)—Occurrence
and Habits of Digenea—Life-History of Distomum
macrostomum—Distomum hepaticum and its Effects—Bilharzia
haematobia—Bisexual Trematodes—Table of Hosts—
Classification 51
CHAPTER III
CESTODA
Introduction—Nature of Cestodes—Occurrence of Cestodes—
The Tape-Worms of Man and Domestic Animals—Table of Life-
Histories of Principal Cestodes of Man and Domestic Animals
—Structure and Development of Cestodes—Table for the
Discrimination of the More Usual Cestodes of Man and
Domestic Animals—Classification 74
CHAPTER IV
MESOZOA
Dicyemidae—Structure—Reproduction—Occurrence:
Orthonectidae—Occurrence—Structure: Trichoplax:
Salinella 92
NEMERTINEA
CHAPTER V
NEMERTINEA
Introductory—External Characters—Anatomy—Classification—
Development—Habits—Regeneration—Breeding—
Geographical Distribution—Land, Fresh-Water, and Parasitic
Forms—Affinities 99
NEMATHELMINTHES AND CHAETOGNATHA

CHAPTER VI
NEMATHELMINTHES
Introduction—Nematoda—Anatomy—Embryology—Classification
—Ascaridae—Strongylidae—Trichotrachelidae—Filariidae—
Mermithidae—Anguillulidae—Enoplidae—Parasitism:
Nematomorpha—Anatomy—Classification—Life-History:
Acanthocephala—Anatomy—Embryology—Classification 123
CHAPTER VII
CHAETOGNATHA
Structure—Reproduction—Habits—Food—Classification—Table
of Identification [see also p. 534] 186
ROTIFERA, GASTROTRICHA, AND KINORHYNCHA

CHAPTER VIII
ROTIFERA, GASTROTRICHA, AND KINORHYNCHA
Rotifera—History—External Features—Movements—Anatomy—
Reproduction—Embryology—Classification—Distribution—
Affinities: Gastrotricha: Kinorhyncha 197
ARCHIANNELIDA, POLYCHAETA, AND MYZOSTOMARIA

CHAPTER IX
The Chaetopodous Worms—The Archiannelida—Anatomy of
Nereis, as Typical of the Polychaeta 241
CHAPTER X
Classification of the Polychaeta—Shape—Head—Parapodia—
Chaetae—Gills—Internal Organs—Jaws—Sense Organs—
Reproduction—Larval Forms—Budding—Fission—Branching—
Regeneration 257
CHAPTER XI
Natural History of Polychaetes—General Habits—Character of 284
Tube and its Formation—Colouring—Protective and Mimetic
Devices—Phosphorescence—Food—Uses—Associated Worms
—Worms as Hosts—Distribution—Fossil Remains
CHAPTER XII
Characters of the Sub-Orders of Polychaetes—Characters of
the Families—Description of British Genera and Species: the
Myzostomaria 303
OLIGOCHAETA (EARTHWORMS, ETC.), AND HIRUDINEA

(LEECHES)
CHAPTER XIII
OLIGOCHAETA (EARTHWORMS AND THEIR ALLIES)
Introduction—Anatomy—Reproduction—Bionomics—Distribution
—Classification—Microdrili and Megadrili 347
CHAPTER XIV
HIRUDINEA (LEECHES)
Introduction—Anatomy—Reproduction—Classification—
Rhynchobdellae and Gnathobdellae 392
GEPHYREA AND PHORONIS

CHAPTER XV
GEPHYREA
Introduction—Anatomy—Development—Sipunculoidea—
Priapuloidea—Echiuroidea—Epithetosomatoidea—Affinities of
the Group 411
CHAPTER XVI
PHORONIS
History—Habits—Structure—Reproduction—Larva—
Metamorphosis—List of Species and Localities—Systematic
Position 450
POLYZOA
CHAPTER XVII
POLYZOA
Introduction—General Characters and Terminology—Brown
Bodies—History—Outlines of Classification—Marine Polyzoa
—Occurrence—Forms of Colony and of Zooecia—Ovicells—
Avicularia—Vibracula—Entoprocta 465
CHAPTER XVIII
POLYZOA—continued
Fresh-water Polyzoa—Phylactolaemata—Occurrence—Structure
of Cristatella—Division of Colony—Movements of Colony—
Retraction And Protrusion of Polypides in Polyzoa—
Statoblasts—Table for Determination of Genera of Fresh-
water Polyzoa—Reproductive Processes of Polyzoa—
Development—Affinities—Metamorphosis—Budding 492
CHAPTER XIX
POLYZOA—continued
Classification—Geographical Distribution—Palaeontology—
Methods for the Examination of Specific Characters—
Terminology—Key for the Determination of the Genera of
British Marine Polyzoa 515
Addendum to Chaetognatha 534
Index 535
SCHEME OF THE CLASSIFICATION ADOPTED IN THIS BOOK
PLATYHELMINTHES (p. 3)
Family.
TURBELLARIA Planoceridae
(p. 3) (p. 19).
Leptoplanidae
Acotylea (p. 16) (p. 19).
Cestoplanidae
(p. 19).
Polycladida
Enantiidae (p. 19).
(p. 7)
Anonymidae (p. 19)
Pseudoceridae
(p. 19).
Cotylea
Euryleptidae (p. 19).
Prosthiostomatidae
(p. 19).
Paludicola
Planariidae (p. 42).
(p. 30)
Procerodidae
Maricola (p. 42).
Tricladida (pp. 30, 32) = Gundidae.
(p. 30) Bdellouridae (p. 42).
Bipaliidae (p. 42).
Terricola Geoplanidae (p. 42).
(pp. 30, 33) Rhynchodemidae
(p. 42).
Rhabdocoelida Proporidae (p. 49).
(p. 42) Acoela (p. 42) Aphanostomatidae
(p. 49).
Macrostomatidae
(p. 49).
Microstomatidae
(p. 49).
Prorhynchidae
Rhabdocoela (p. 49).
(p. 43) Mesostomatidae
(p. 49).
Proboscidae (p. 49).
Vorticidae (p. 50).
Solenopharyngidae
(p. 50).
Alloeocoela Plagiostomatidae
(p. 43) (p. 50).
Bothrioplanidae
(p. 50).
Monotidae (p. 50).
Temnocephalidae
(pp. 53, 73).
Tristomatidae
(pp. 53, 73).
Monogenea (pp. 5, 52)
Polystomatidae
= Heterocotylea + Aspidocotylea
(pp. 53, 73).
(p. 73)
Gyrodactylidae
(pp. 53, 61).
Aspidobothridae
(p. 73).
TREMATODA Holostomatidae
(pp. 3, 51) (p. 73).
Amphistomatidae
(p. 73).
Distomatidae
Digenea (pp. 5, 52) = Malacocotylea (p. 73).
(p. 73) Gasterostomatidae
(p. 73).
Didymozoontidae
(p. 73).
Monostomatidae
(p. 73).
Cestodariidae
= Monozoa (p. 91).
Bothriocephalidae
(p. 91).
CESTODA (pp. 3, 74) Tetrarhynchidae
(p. 91).
Tetraphyllidae
(p. 91).
Taeniidae (p. 91).
MESOZOA
Dicyemidae (p. 93).
MESOZOA (pp. 3, 92) Orthonectida
(p. 94).
NEMERTINEA (p. 99)
HOPLONEMERTEA (p. 110) = Metanemertini (p. 112).
SCHIZONEMERTEA (p. 111) = Heteronemertini (ex parte) (p. 113).
PALAEONEMERTEA (p. 111) = Protonemertini (p. 112). + Mesonemertini
(p. 112). + Heteronemertini (ex parte) (p. 113).
NEMATHELMINTHES (p. 123)

Ascaridae (p. 138).
Strongylidae
(p. 142).
Trichotrachelidae
(p. 144).
Filariidae (p. 147).
Mermithidae
NEMATODA (pp. 123, 124) (p. 150).
Anguillulidae
(p. 154).
Enoplidae (p. 157).
Chaetosomatidae
(p. 158).
Desmoscolecidae
(p. 159).
NEMATOMORPHA (pp. 123, 164) Gordiidae (p. 164).
Echinorhynchidae
(p. 182)
Gigantorhynchidae
(p. 183).
ACANTHOCEPHALA (pp. 123, 174)
Neorhynchidae
(p. 184).
Arhynchidae
(p. 185).
CHAETOGNATHA (p. 186)
ROTIFERA (p. 197)

FLOSCULARIACEAE (p. 220) Flosculariidae
(p. 221).
Apsilidae (p. 221).
Melicertidae
(p. 221).
MELICERTACEAE (p. 221)
Trochosphaeridae
(p. 221).
Philodinidae
BDELLOIDA (p. 222)
(p. 222).
Asplanchnidae
ASPLANCHNACEAE (p. 222)
(p. 223).
Pedalionidae
SCIRTOPODA (p. 223)
(p. 223).
Microcodonidae
(p. 224).
Rhinopidae (p. 224).
Hydatinidae
(p. 224).
Synchaetidae
Illoricata (p. 223)
(p. 224).
Notommatidae
(p. 224).
Drilophagidae
(p. 224).
Triarthridae (p. 224).
Rattulidae (p. 225).
PLOIMA (p. 223)
Dinocharididae
(p. 225).
Salpinidae (p. 225).
Euchlanididae
(p. 225).
Cathypnidae
Loricata (p. 224)
(p. 225).
Coluridae (p. 225).
Pterodinidae
(p. 225).
Brachionidae
(p. 225).
Anuraeidae (p. 225).
SEISONACEAE (p. 225) Seisonidae (p. 226).
GASTROTRICHA
GASTROTRICHA Euichthydina (p. 235)
(p. 231). Apodina (p. 235)
KINORHYNCHA (p. 236)
CHAETOPODA (p. 241)

ARCHIANNELIDA (p. 241)
POLYCHAETA Phanerocephala Syllidae (p. 306).

(pp. 241, 245) (p. 303) Hesionidae (p. 308).
Aphroditidae
(p. 309).
Phyllodocidae
(p. 313).
Tomopteridae
(p. 315).
Nereidae (p. 315).
Nereidiformia Nephthydidae
(p. 303) (p. 317).
Amphinomidae
(p. 318).
Eunicidae (p. 318).
Glyceridae (p. 320).
Sphaerodoridae
(p. 320).
Ariciidae (p. 321).
Typhloscolecidae
(p. 321).
Spionidae (p. 321).
Polydoridae
(p. 323).
Spioniformia Chaetopteridae
(p. 304) (p. 323).
Magelonidae (325.
Ammocharidae
(p. 325).
Terebelliformia Cirratulidae (p. 325).
(p. 304) Terebellidae
(p. 327).
Ampharetidae
(p. 330).
Amphictenidae
(p. 330).
Capitelliformia Capitellidae
(p. 305) (p. 331).
Opheliidae (p. 331).
Maldanidae
(p. 332).
Arenicolidae
(p. 333).
Scoleciformia
Scalibregmidae
(p. 305)
(p. 334).
Chlorhaemidae
(p. 334).
Sternaspidae
(p. 335).
Sabellidae (p. 336).
Eriographidae
Sabelliformia (p. 338).
Cryptocephala (p. 305) Amphicorinidae
(p. 303) (p. 339).
Serpulidae (p. 339).
Hermelliformia Hermellidae
(p. 306) (p. 341).
MYZOSTOMARIA (pp. 241, 341)
OLIGOCHAETA Microdrili (p. 373) Aphaneura (p. 374).

(pp. 241, 347) Enchytraeidae
(p. 375).
Discodrilidae
(p. 376).
Phreoryctidae
(p. 376).
Naidomorpha
(p. 377).
Tubificidae (p. 378).
Lumbriculidae
(p. 379).
Moniligastridae
(p. 380).
Perichaetidae
(p. 380).
Cryptodrilidae
(p. 382).
Acanthodrilidae
Megadrili (pp. 373, 374). (p. 384).
Eudrilidae (p. 385).
Geoscolicidae
(p. 386).
Lumbricidae
(p. 388).
HIRUDINEA (p. 392)

Ichthyobdellidae
(p. 406).
RHYNCHOBDELLAE (p. 405)
Glossiphoniidae
(p. 406).
Gnathobdellidae
(p. 407).
GNATHOBDELLAE (p. 407)
Herpobdellidae
(p. 407).
GEPHYREA (p. 411)

SIPUNCULOIDEA (pp. 412, 420).
PRIAPULOIDEA (pp. 412, 430).
ECHIUROIDEA (pp. 412, 434).
EPITHETOSOMATOIDEA (pp. 412, 444).
PHORONIS (p. 450)
POLYZOA (p. 465)

ENTOPROCTA (pp. 475, 487)
ECTOPROCTA Gymnolaemata Cyclostomata Articulata (p. 517).

(p. 475) (p. 476) (p. 477) Inarticulata (p. 517).
Cheilostomata Cellularina (p. 518).
(p. 477) Flustrina (p. 518).
Escharina (p. 518).
Alcyonellea (p. 518).
Ctenostomata
Vesicularina
(p. 477)
(p. 518).
Phylactolaemata (pp. 476, 493)
PLATYHELMINTHES AND MESOZOA
BY
F. W. GAMBLE, M.Sc. (Vict.)

Demonstrator and Assistant-Lecturer in Zoology in the Owens College, Manchester.
CHAPTER I
TURBELLARIA
INTRODUCTION: DESCRIPTION OF THE POLYCLAD LEPTOPLANA TREMELLARIS—

APPEARANCE—HABITS—STRUCTURE: POLYCLADIDA—CLASSIFICATION—HABITS—
ANATOMY—DEVELOPMENT: TRICLADIDA—OCCURRENCE—STRUCTURE—
CLASSIFICATION: RHABDOCOELIDA—OCCURRENCE—HABITS—REPRODUCTION—
CLASSIFICATION.
The Platyhelminthes, or Flat Worms, form a natural assemblage of animals, the

members of which, however widely they may differ in appearance, habits, or life-
history, exhibit a fundamental similarity of organisation which justifies their
separation from other classes of worms, and their union into a distinct phylum.
Excluding the leeches (Hirudinea), and the long sea-worms (Nemertinea)—which,
though formerly included, are now treated independently—the Platyhelminthes
may be divided into three branches: (1) Turbellaria (including the Planarians), (2)
Trematoda (including the liver-flukes), and (3) Cestoda (tape-worms). The
Mesozoa will be treated as an appendix to the Platyhelminthes.
The Turbellaria were so called by Ehrenberg[1] (1831) on account of the cilia or

vibratile processes with which these aquatic animals are covered, causing by their
incessant action, tiny currents ("turbellae," disturbances) in the surrounding water.
The ciliary covering distinguishes this free-living group from the parasitic
Trematodes and Cestodes, some of which possess such an investment, but only
during their early free larval stage, for the short period when they have left the
parental host and are seeking another (Figs. 26, 27, 42).
Some Turbellaria (Rhabdocoelida) resemble Infusoria in their minute size, shape,

and movements. Nevertheless they possess an organisation of considerable
complexity. The fresh-water Planarians (Fig. 14), abounding in ponds and streams,
vary from a quarter to half an inch in length, and are elongated and flattened. Their
body is soft, and progresses by a characteristic, even, gliding motion like a snail.
The marine Planarians or Polyclads (Fig. 8) are usually broad and leaf-like,
sometimes attaining a length of six inches, and swim or creep in a most graceful
way. Land Planarians occur in this country (Fig. 15), but far more abundantly in
tropical and sub-tropical districts, in moist places, venturing abroad at night in
pursuit of prey. They are elongated and cylindrical, in some cases measuring,
when fully extended, a foot or more in length, and are often ornamented with
brilliantly coloured, longitudinal bands.
Turbellaria are carnivorous, overpowering their prey by peculiar cutaneous

offensive weapons, and then sucking out the contents of the victim by the
"pharynx." Land Planarians feed on earthworms, molluscs, and wood-lice; fresh-
water Planarians on Oligochaet worms, water-snails, and water-beetles; marine
forms devour Polychaet worms and molluscs. Some Turbellaria seem to prefer
freshly-killed or weakly examples of animals too large to be overpowered when
fully active. Certain Rhabdocoelida are messmates of Molluscs and Echinoderms,
and a few others are truly parasitic—a mode of life adopted by all Trematodes save
Temnocephala.
The Trematodes[2] may be divided into those living on the outer surface of various
aquatic animals, usually fish (Ectoparasites); and those which penetrate more or
less deeply into the alimentary canal or the associated organs of the host
(Endoparasites). They are oval, flattened Platyhelminthes ranging from a
microscopic size to a length of three feet (Nematobothrium, Fig. 22), and are
provided with organs of adhesion by which they cling to the outer surface, or to the
interior, of the animals they inhabit. Trematodes occur parasitically in all groups of
Vertebrates, but, with the exception of the liver-flukes of the sheep (Distomum
hepaticum and D. magnum), and of Bilharzia haematobia found in man (in the
blood-vessels of the urinary bladder) over the greater part of Africa, their attacks
are not usually of a serious nature. Ectoparasitic Trematodes are Monogenetic;
that is, their larvae grow up directly into mature forms. The Endoparasitic species,
however, are usually Digenetic. Their larvae enter an Invertebrate and produce a
new generation of different larvae, and these another. The last are immature
flukes. They enter a second host, which is swallowed by the final Vertebrate host in
which they become mature.
The Cestodes or Tape-worms have undergone more profound modifications both in

structure and in mode of development. They are all endoparasitic, and, with one
exception (Archigetes), attain maturity solely within the alimentary canal of
Vertebrates. In length they range from a few millimetres to several metres, but this
great size is attained from the need for the rapid production and accumulation of
enormous numbers of eggs. The "head" or "scolex" is attached to the mucous
membrane of the host by suckers or hooks, but there is no mouth nor any certain

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The Evolutions of Modernist Epic

The Evolutions of Modernist Epic

Rifkind Foundation grants, and several PSC-CUNY Awards, jointly funded

Introduction: By the Light of the Eclipse 1

BY ﬁrm immutable immortal laws

2     

was referred to as transnational. More recently, this political-economic

³ In Planetary Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity Across Time (New York: Columbia

:       3

How can we approach modernism as a consequence not just of globalization,

Between the Scylla of Two Cultures and the

But in order to arrive at this book’s take on comparative modernism and

4     

Our course is set between two opposing standpoints on the question of

:       5

6     

hermeneutics, the Iliad comes into focus as “a drama of naked apes”

:       7

8     

evolutionary epic tends to render natural history as winner’s history,

²¹ Qtd. in Jonathan Greenberg, “Introduction: Darwin and Literary Studies,” Twentieth

:       9

describing. In this exhibition there was, Latour writes, “a parallel, a common

²³ Bruno Latour, “A Textbook Case Revisited: Knowledge as Mode of Existence,” in The

10     

Overview of the Chapters

:       11

12     

:       13

14     

composition. Although each is deeply idiosyncratic, they arrive at a similar

Modernism and the Eclipse of Darwinism

Earlier I cited E. O. Wilson’s 1978 work On Human Nature. I then promised

²⁷ Stevenson, Darwin among the Poets, 1.

:       15

debate circulated throughout the later nineteenth century.²⁸ In particular, as

16     

champions this agenda in “Le Roman expérimental.” Proposing that creative

:       17

evolutionary thought in their ﬁction, many modernists saw that evolution

18     

genetics did it begin to seem that Mendelism and Darwinism might be

:       19

Dahin ist die Zeit, wo C. Du Prel die Lyrik für »paläontologische

For Rádl, Nietzsche stands at the prow here of a creative insurgency in

⁴⁵ Rádl, Geschichte, 541. ⁴⁶ Rádl, Geschichte, 542. My translation.

20     

global reach—as entailed on, and participating in the new developments in

According to Huxley, the response of ﬁgures like William Bateson or Hugo

:       21

Darwinism were—as many critics have noted—profound and personal. In

Epic in the 1920s

In one of the many self-conscious twists of Miguel de Cervantes’s Don

22     

well as to the incorporation of other genres.⁵¹ It is the novel that is celebrated

:       23

24     

Le retour de ce samedi asymétrique était un de ces petits événements