Suchergebnisse

This essay follows the question of variation—why are no two natural beings the same?—from its subordinate role in Darwin's early theory of natural selection to a dominant but carefully restricted role as a positive incentive to reproduction in his later theory of sexual selection. The author wants to see Darwin's career-long fascination with the coevolution of orchids and their insect pollinators as the emergence within his theory of an alternative to natural selection—a positive force of attraction that works both on and through variation. The currency of the orchid-wasp relationship in contemporary critical theory suggests that such an alternative motor for history is beginning to surface there as well.

nancy armstrong is Nancy Duke Lewis Professor of English,Comparative Literature, Modern Culture and Media, and Gender Studies at Brown University. She is the editor of the journal Novel: A Forum on Fiction, coeditor of the Oxford University Encyclopedia of British Literary History, and author of Desire and Domestic Fiction(Oxford University Press, 1987), The Imaginary Puritan (University of California Press, 1992), Fiction in the Age of Photography (Harvard University Press, 2000), and How Novels Think (Columbia University Press, 2005). This essay is based on the last chapter of her forthcoming book.

nancy armstrong is Nancy Duke Lewis Professor of Comparative Literature, English, Modern Culture and Media, and Women's Studies at Brown University. She is author of Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (Oxford University Press, 1987), The Imaginary Puritan: Literature, Intellectual Labor, and the Origins of Personal Life(with Leonard Tennenhouse) (University of California Press, 1992), andFiction in the Age of Photography: The Legacy of British Realism(Harvard University Press, 1999). This essay is a curious digression from her current book project, which has to do with the way novels write us and we in turn read them.

This essay argues that sovereignty, both the form of government and the law it constitutes, can be understood in terms of what it keeps out and at bay—namely, historically specific forms of formlessness. Assuming that formlessness does indeed have a form, the authors see it emerging in Jacobean tragedy whenever something happens to the body of the legitimate monarch and poses a threat to culture itself, endangering kinship along with the metaphysics of kingship. In Hobbes's Leviathan, sovereignty is no longer immanent in nature and the order of the universe itself but is a purely cultural or, in Hobbes's phrase, "artificial" thing. Hobbes designs the figure of Leviathan to render unthinkable the possibility of a many-headed body politic. Rather than set Hobbes in opposition to Locke and Defoe, who together arguably inaugurate the Enlightenment, the authors contend that such modern notions of self-sovereignty are defensive formations, responding to the same pressure of the multitude that shapes Leviathan.