This book explores the impact of genetic and postgenomic science on British literary fiction over the last four decades, focusing on the challenge posed to novelists by gene-centric neo-Darwinism and examining the recent rapprochement between postgenomic perspectives and literary understandings of human nature. It assesses the rise to cultural prominence of neo-Darwinism in the form of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology, thought styles which were predicated on scientific reductionism and genetic determinism. It explores the ways in which the fiction of Doris Lessing, A.S. Byatt, and Ian McEwan critiques neo-Darwinism but also registers the extent to which these writers are persuaded by the neo-Darwinian view of human behaviour as driven by genetic self-interest. It goes on to consider the ‘new biology’ that emerged around the turn of the millennium, as gene-centrism was displaced by a more dynamic and holistic view of the development and function of living organisms. It reads the work of Eva Hoffman, Kazuo Ishiguro, Margaret Drabble, and Jackie Kay as converging with this shift in which the organism is reconfigured as agentic and self-organizing but caught up in complex co-dependencies with other organisms. The archetypal postgenomic science of epigenetics is crucial in facilitating this change, disclosing the ways in which the genome is constantly modified in response to environmental cues and sponsoring a view of identity in terms of plasticity and mutability, a view more congenial to many writers than the concept of genetic predetermination.
A perspectiva do texto no processo da tradução. Sobre a autobiografia Lost in Translation de Eva Hoffman
