Colonies, cults and evolution : literature, science and culture in nineteenth-century writing / David Amigoni.

Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2007.

xi, 237 pages ; 24 cm.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 223-233) and index.

'Symbolical of more important things': writing science, religion and colonialism in Coleridge's 'culture' -- 'Our origin, what matters it?': Wordsworth's excursive portmanteau of culture -- Charles Darwin's entanglements with stray colonists: cultivation and the species questions -- 'In one another's being mingle': biology and the dissemination of 'culture' after 1859 -- Samuel Butler's symbolic offensives: colonies and mechanical devices in the margins of evolutionary writing -- Edmund Gosse's cultural evolution: sympathetic magic, imitation and contagious literature -- Conclusion: culture's field, culture's vital robe.