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Evolution of Ethics in the Island of Doctor Moreau and Heart of Darkness

This thesis analyzes H. G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness within the context of nineteenth-century evolutionary theory. I explore how Charles Darwin and Thomas Huxley used evolution by natural selection to develop differing explanations of the origins of ethics and how this impacted the place each scientist gave morality in civilization. By exploring how Huxley and Darwin understood morality to derive from the phenomena of sympathy and restrain, I illustrate how Wells’s and Conrad’s novellas interrogate these discourses of altruism.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:GEORGIA/oai:digitalarchive.gsu.edu:english_theses-1137
Date07 August 2012
CreatorsAnlicker, Christine D
PublisherDigital Archive @ GSU
Source SetsGeorgia State University
Detected LanguageEnglish
Typetext
Formatapplication/pdf
SourceEnglish Theses

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