Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 05 Oct 2015).

'Pleasure like a tragedy': imagination and the material world -- Fit and misfitting: anthropomorphism and the natural order -- Analogy, metaphor and narrative in The origin -- Darwinian myths -- George Eliot: Middlemarch -- George Eliot: Daniel Deronda and the idea of a future life -- Descent and sexual selection: women in narrative -- Finding a scale for the human: plot and writing in Hardy's novels.

Gillian Beer's landmark book demonstrates how Darwin overturned fundamental cultural assumptions in his narratives, how George Eliot, Thomas Hardy and other writers pursued and resisted their contradictory implications, and how the stories he produced about natural selection and the struggle for life now underpin our culture. This second edition of Darwin's Plots incorporates a new preface by the author and a foreword by the distinguished American scholar George Levine.