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Evolutionary thought transformed nineteenth-century American intellectual life. This book details how it shaped literature in the middle decades of the century and intersected with Romantic conceptions of selfhood, society, and the history of life. Jennifer J. Baker reads the era's Romanticism in relation to Darwin as well as naturalists, embryologists, ethnologists, anthropologists, and even Biblical creationists who used evolutionary frameworks to understand the past and future. The "evolutionary idea" encompassed much more than Darwinism, she argues, and even Darwinism in these decades was variously understood and not necessarily the secular, mechanistic, and deterministic thinking we now associate with the Gilded Age. Baker uncovers an earlier, Romantic evolutionism in writing about self-culture, social reform, racial uplift, prehistoric life and cultures, and the creation of art.

Baker proposes that American Romanticism was itself a way of thinking about the human condition in the terms of evolutionary process. She draws on an extensive literary archive, including works by Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller, Douglass, Delany, Dickinson, Whitman, Melville, Hawthorne, and Poe, to detail how writers understood change and innovation as the product of teleology, chance, social organization, environmental pressures, and, not least of all, the past.