Life, Re-Scaled The Biological Imagination in Twenty-First-Century Literature and Performance

Abstract

Looking back at the twentieth century, evolutionary biology and genetics stand out as two immensely influential sciences, whose images and discourses shaped the imagination of life across cultural forms. While Darwin’s ‘plots’, as Gillian Beer noted in 2000, continued to generate productive and conflicting narratives, Darwin’s presence ‘in argument and in popular imagination’ was strengthened by the progressive rise of genetic research.1 The ‘modern synthesis’2 of the theory of evolution with that of Mendelian heredity, and the subsequent discovery of DNA and mapping of genes, prolonged and renewed many of the controversies surrounding the first reception of The Origin of Species.