ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explores the intersection of William Wordsworth and evolution in Matthew Arnold’s creative and critical writing. It examines how conflicts between Darwinism and Wordsworth’s writing influenced Robert Louis Stevenson’s work across his career through an analysis of his fiction, essays, letters, and annotated copy of Wordsworth’s The Poetical Works. Stevenson criticizes and revises Wordsworth’s poetry, emphasizing that some of the poet’s central ideas, such as the “spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling” and nature’s role as a moral guide, become threatening after Charles Darwin. The book explains Wordsworth’s neglected role in Thomas Hardy’s pessimistic evolutionary preoccupations. Scholars have more recently argued for a bright side to Hardy’s Darwinian thinking, which Gillian Beer describes as “happiness” and George Levine calls “fullness”.
