The following is an abstract for a conference paper proposal I just sent out. Thought some of you might be interested--in any case it explains why I've been so obsessed with the stone age lately... wish me luck!Evolutionary theory, popularized in America after the Civil War,drastically altered the ways in which humans imagined their relation to nature. Darwinian theories of natural selection, which since the publication of On the Origin of Species 150 years ago have slowly eroded notions of human centrality and progressive development, existed in the cultural imagination alongside competing evolutionary models like that of Herbert Spencer that, far from challenging these assumptions, merely adapted them to pseudo-scientific narratives of the perfectibility of the species, and the superiority of civilized over “primitive” modes of existence.“Prehistoric Fictions,” a paper taken from the introductory chapter of my dissertation on evolution and American Literature, will explore how late 19th and early 20th century naturalist novels reflected the tension between these competing views of prehistory, with their diverging implications as to the “nature” of the human species. Using Joseph Meeker’s distinction between “tragic” and “comic” plots in The Comedy of Survival: Studies in Literary Ecology (1974), I will look at two novels… read more