Autobiologies

What does heredity mean for identity? What role does the individual have in shaping a personal, and indeed a larger human, future? What is the ethical status of seemingly biologically determined behaviours? What does individual death mean in the light of species extinction? In Autobiologies: Charles Darwin and the Natural History of the Self, Alexis Harley shows how questions like these played out in Victorian life writing. Considering texts as diverse as Charles Darwin's Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals and Oscar Wilde's De Profundis, this study demonstrates the ways in which various nineteenth-century evolutionary theories shaped nineteenth-century autobiographical practices and ultimately refashioned the human subject. But far from portraying autobiographers as the passive recipients of biology's influence, Autobiologies also explores how the lived experiences of individual evolutionary theorists, and the ways of thinking about life embedded in the autobiographical genres to which they turned, in turn impacted upon their biological formulations. Staging a series of detailed and historically nuanced readings of Victorian natural historians' autobiographies and other works, this book brings lives and life-writing, including diary, elegy, correspondence, biography, memoir, and autobiography, into conversation with theories of species, classification, origins, development, transformation, selection, heredity, continuity and variation, extinction, degeneration, recapitulation, and ways of knowing. It details the discursive exchanges between different modes of life writing: the rhetoric of fact-gathering, observation and interpretation, performances of scientific objectivity, and the co-development of autobiography and evolutionary theory, both of which are fundamentally retrospective and change-focused.