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Summary

Remarkably, literature was the field where Darwinian thinking was immediately and warmly received. Charles Dickens’s weekly magazine, All the Year Round, at once published articles that gave detailed, sympathetic accounts of the theory of the Origin, and these were followed by writers using Darwinian themes in their fiction and poetry, Dickens himself using sexual selection to structure a key relationship in Our Mutual Friend. This continues to the present, when leading novelists like Ian McEwan and Marilynne Robinson use very different reactions to Darwin to mold their narratives.

Summary

This brief coda examines the curious case of Marilynne Robinson, one of the most decorated living American novelists who seems like she would easily be aligned with American conservatism, but is not, for reasons that are intertwined with the perceived anti-intellectualism of the political Right. In short, Robinson epitomizes the prevailing, though flawed, assumption within the literary field that the cultural capital associated with highbrow literature is inevitably aligned with progressive liberalism.

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9 - Literature

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Epilogue: The Curious (Conservative) Case of Marilynne Robinson

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9 - Literature

Summary

Epilogue: The Curious (Conservative) Case of Marilynne Robinson

Summary