Allen MacDuffie on Darwin and Cataclysmic Change
From The History of Literature Podcast with Jacke Wilson
For tens of thousands of years, human beings have been using fictional devices to shape their worlds and communicate with one another. Four thousand years ago they began writing down these stories, and a great flourishing of human achievement began. We know it today as literature, a term broad enough to encompass everything from ancient epic poetry to contemporary novels. How did literature develop? What forms has it taken? And what can we learn from engaging with these works today?
Hosted by Jacke Wilson, an amateur scholar with a lifelong passion for literature, The History of Literature takes a fresh look at some of the most compelling examples of creative genius the world has ever known.
Dealing with reality can be difficult enough, but when the nature of that reality is completely overturned – as it is in a case like the climate crisis – people are left with a feeling of intense uncertainty. What does this mean for us? How do we cope? How, in other words, do we psychologically absorb a revelation that threatens to overwhelm everything we believe about ourselves and our place in the universe? In this episode, Jacke talks to Allen MacDuffie about his new book Climate of Denial: Darwin, Climate Change, and the Literature of the Long Nineteenth Century, which looks at how writers like George Eliot and H.G. Wells dealt with the new normal of a post-Darwinian world – and asks whether those examples might help readers wrestle with today’s cataclysmic problems. PLUS novelist Adelle Waldman (Help Wanted) stops by to discuss her choice for the last book she will ever read.
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